Roberto Meli- Laurea in Scienze dell'Informazione
- CEO at DPO Srl
Roberto Meli
- Laurea in Scienze dell'Informazione
- CEO at DPO Srl
About
56
Publications
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Introduction
I am currently CEO of DPO Srl and Director of Functional Size Measurement standards in IFPUG. I act as a consultant and lecturer in training courses on project management and software measurement, In the last 25 years I played the following roles: chairperson of the board of Directors of GUFPI-ISMA (Italian Software Measurement Association), Italian delegate to the MAIN, Chairperson of the COSMIC Measurement Practices Committee and President of Simple FP Association.
Current institution
DPO Srl
Current position
- CEO
Publications
Publications (56)
Reference manual for the Early & Quick Function Points method v 3.1 ed. 1.1
The “Early & Quick Function Points Approach (E&QFPA)” is a mean to approximate the results of some standard Functional Size Measurement Methods like IFPUG, SiFP or COSMIC. E&QFPA is a set of concepts and procedures that, even when applied to non-detailed functional specifications of a software system, maintains the overall structure and the essenti...
There are two main paths to state the base unitary price per FP in a Request for Proposal or a Public Tender. The first one is to rely on previous similar assigned contracts and their unitary prices adopting averages or min-max values (market approach). The second one is to build a specific unitary price considering expected average productivity, a...
Customer verification of functional size measures provided by the supplier in the acceptance phase is a critical task for the correctness of contract execution. A lack of control by the customer, both in depth and in scope, can lead to relevant deviations of the actual unitary price if compared to that accepted in the bid assignment process, with p...
Functional size measures are widely used for estimating software development effort. After the introduction of Function Points, a few “simplified” measures have been proposed, aiming to make measurement simpler and applicable when fully detailed software specifications are not yet available. However, some practitioners believe that, when considerin...
Tutti i progetti sono adatti ad essere affrontati con il ricorso al mercato? Esistono situazioni in cui l’in-sourcing è meglio dell’out-sourcing? Un approccio “situazionale” come quello illustrato nel seguito può dare una risposta concreta a queste domande (make or buy?). Una volta scelta correttamente l’opzione “buy” e la forma contrattuale più ad...
Functional size measures are often used as the basis for estimating development effort, because they are available in the early stages of software development. Several simplified measurement methods have also been proposed, both to decrease the cost of measurement and to make functional size measurement applicable when functional user requirements...
Measuring software functional size via standard Function Points Analysis (FPA) requires the availability of fully specified requirements and specific competencies. Most of the time, the need to measure software functional size occurs well in advance with respect to these ideal conditions, under the lack of complete information or skilled experts. T...
Background Several functional size measurement methods have been proposed. A few ones -like IFPUG and COSMIC methods- are widely used, while others -like Simple Function Points method- are interesting new proposals, which promise to deliver functional size measures via a faster and cheaper measurement process. Objectives Since all functional size m...
Nell’Anno Domini 2014, il software custom è ancora valorizzato economicamente come le arance al mercato: tipo d’arancia, peso delle arance e prezzo al kilo. Per il software, il tipo d’arancia corrisponde all’ambito tecnologico o applicativo ed il peso della frutta al “volume” da rilasciare misurato in Function Point (FP). Il software, però, è un be...
Functional Size Measurement Methods are becoming quite common in the software engineering academic and business community but their contractual usage is still quite primitive. Many software development or enhancement contracts are based exclusively on the functional size as a cost driver. No explicit consideration is given to requirements which are...
Simple Function Point is a functional size measurement method that can be used in place of IFPUG Function Point, but requires a much simpler –hence less time and effort consuming– measurement process. Simple Function Point was designed to be equivalent to IFPUG Function Point in terms of numerical results. This paper
reports an empirical study aimi...
The COSMIC method provides a standardized way of measuring the functional size of software from the functional domains commonly referred to as ‘business application’ or ‘Management Information Systems’ (MIS) and ‘real-time’ software, and hybrids of these.
In practice it is often sufficient to measure a functional size approximately. Typical situati...
Customer verification of functional size measures provided by the supplier in the acceptance phase is a critical activity for the correctness of contract execution. A lack of control, both in depth and in scope, can lead to relevant deviations compared to the unit price accepted in the bid assignment process, with potential consequences in terms of...
The IFPUG Function Points method has originally been developed almost 35 years ago. The need was for a way to capture in numbers the functional value for users of a certain software application. At that moment the development process was largely "handmade" and "Lines of Code" was the main measurement method available. Detailed statements of functio...
The IFPUG Function Points method has originally been developed almost 35 years ago. The need was for a way to capture in numbers the functional value for users of a certain software application. At that moment the development process was largely "handmade" and "Lines of Code" was the main measurement method available. Detailed statements of functio...
Tutti i modelli di “maturità” dei sistemi di Project, Program e Portfolio Management disponibili nella comunità internazionale, derivati in misura più o meno diretta dallo schema originario del CMMI, prevedono stati di maturità corrispondenti a diverse configurazioni di capacità (capability), best practice e risultati. Gli stati sono posizionati in...
Tutti i modelli di “maturità” dei sistemi di Project, Program e Portfolio Management disponibili nella comunità internazionale, derivati in misura più o meno diretta dallo schema originario del CMMI, prevedono stati di maturità corrispondenti a diverse configurazioni di capacità (capability), best practice e risultati. Gli stati sono posizionati in...
The Early & Quick technique was originally proposed in 1997 for IFPUG Function Points, to size software in early stages of the development process, when functional requirements are still to be established in a detailed form and/or when a rapid measure is needed for existing software from a high-level viewpoint, within limited time. Typical lack of...
This paper describes and explains a few significant changes which have been made to the COSMIC FFP method of functional sizing of software targeted to be published in the Measurement Manual Version 2.2 (October 2002) and in the draft ISO/IEC 19761standard version of the method. These changes have been made to help understanding and consistent use o...
Some of the major reasons for software project failures relay in the area of the management of project objectives and requirements. In the actual "ever changing world", software requirements are subjected to continuous changes that might claim revisions of the allocated resources. Estimating effort, duration and costs from stable requirements is a...
![Figure 2. An example of a configuration of functional layers [2]](profile/Alain-Abran/publication/2503503/figure/fig1/AS:669383147929609@1536604787524/An-example-of-a-configuration-of-functional-layers-2_Q320.jpg)
Software measurement plays a key role in software engineering and, to improve its performance, an organisation needs to measure software at each stage of the development life cycle. Recently, the COSMIC-FFP measurement method has been developed to improve the measurement of the functional size of a large array of software types. By quantifying soft...
The appearance of the Function Point technique has allowed the ICT community to increase significantly the practice of software measurement, with respect to the use of the traditional "Lines of Code approach". A FP count, however, requires a complete and detailed level of descriptive documentation, like the Functional Specifications of the software...
The purpose of this work is to make a practical contribution to those interested in achieving a successful software project by knowingly and methodically reducing the major risks associated with it. For a project, risk may be imagined as the possibility of not achieving one or more of its specified and agreed-upon objectives, with the damage that d...
The benchmarking activities to which this work refers are based on technical and administrative data gathered from software projects using appropriate systems of measurement, first among which at present is Function Point Analysis. Benchmarking databases contain actual data regarding not only the size of a software project, but its productive facto...
Due to the wider use of Function Point metrics in the software management field, there is an increasing need for methods to estimate, at an early stage of the software life cycle, a software application's value in Function Points. This work describes how to use the Early Function Points method (presented at IFPUG 97, Scottsdale, September 97) from...
1 Functional metrics (especially IFPUG Function Point and Mark II Function Point) are gaining dominance over "technological" type metrics (Lines of Code). Although this takes place quite rapidly from the "cultural" standpoint, on a practical level the process is much slower due to the large quantity of code measurements already present in any compa...
This work describes the basic elements of a risk management method supplementing a number of different public domain approaches, such as PRM body of knowledge from Project Management Institute, CTC from the Software Engineering Institute, the Euromethod strategy model, those described by McFarlan, Archibald, and others. Although the SAFE method ori...
As a consequence of the wider use of the Function Point metrics in the software management field there is an increasing need for methods to estimate in an early stage of the software life cycle the number of Function Points related to a software application. The present paper describes a new technique to estimate Function Points (Early and Extended...
The field of software measurement is often an arena where supporters of Functional Measurement Methods -Function Points, mainly -confront themselves with supporters of Technical Measurement Methods – like the ones based on LOC, number of programs, modules, reports, screens, classes, objects, components, boxes, widgets etc. Both the parties usually...
Early & Quick Function Points analysis (E&QFP) was invented in 1997 by Roberto Meli in order to facilitate IFPUG Function Points estimation and was presented at the ESCOM 97 conference, for the first time. Since then, the usage of the method has been spread out all over the world and E&QFP has probably become the most used functional size estimatio...
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) represents one of the performance management frameworks adopted with great success in business circles in recent years. One of its most valuable strengths is its linkage of the strategic and operational levels, through a quantitative and qualitative management using a series of indicators from four different perspective...
Le attività di benchmarking, a cui questo lavoro fa riferimento, sono basate sulla raccolta di dati tecnici e gestionali misurati attraverso l'uso di opportuni sistemi metrici tra cui primeggiano oggi i Function Point. I data base di benchmarking contengono dati consuntivi relativi alle dimensioni ma anche ai fattori produttivi relativi a progetti...
The application of software functional size metrics, as IFPUG Function Points and COSMIC Full Function Points, frequently reveals serious difficulties arising from the lack of a detailed and complete description of the functional user requirements of the systems being measured. This kind of difficulties, combined with the obvious need to provide an...
Function Point Analysis is a software measurement technique which is gaining wider diffusion all over the world even if some experts pointed out various problems affecting it. The present paper describes a new technique for Function Points estimation (Early and Extended Function Points Method) with the objective to solve some of these problems. The...
In the field of software estimation, supporters of a rather pragmatic and individualistic approach - based mainly on intuition and personal evidence - usually undertake endless discussions with supporters of a more general and theoretical approach - based on the collection and statistical analysis of actual data from past finished projects. The pre...
Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di fornire un contributo pratico a coloro che sono interessati a perseguire il successo di un progetto software, attraverso la riduzione consapevole e metodica dei principali rischi ad esso associati. Un rischio, per un progetto, può essere immaginato come la eventualità di non riuscire a raggiungere uno o più deg...
Il presente lavoro descrive gli elementi fondamentali di un metodo di gestione del rischio di progetto che integra diversi approcci di pubblico dominio come il PRM body of knowledge del Project Management Institute, il CTC del Software Engineering Institute, il modello delle strategie Euromethod nonché quelli descritti da McFarlan, Archibald ed alt...
In conseguenza dell'ampio utilizzo della metrica dei Function Points nel campo del software management, si riscontra una crescente esigenza di metodi per stimare, in un momento alto del ciclo di vita del software, il valore in Function Points di una applicazione software. Questo lavoro descrive come utilizzare il metodo degli Early Function Points...
When managing software procurement in a market environment, the customer-supplier contractual relationship is among the most important issues to be considered. In the case of a delivery including software development or maintenance, the economical evaluation approach adopted either in the tender process and in the day by day management of the contr...
Questions
Question (1)
Data related to project effort and productivity expressed in Hours per FP are currently publicly available (for example ISBSG data bases). No official collection of market unitary prices is actually available despite this information could be very useful for international comparisons and de-localization decisions. An international initiative could be launched on this theme.
