Applying Function Point Analysis to Effort Estimation in Configurator Development
Alexander Felfernig, Alexander Salbrechter · 2004
Knowledge-based configuration is a successful application of Artificial Intelligence approaches in industry (e.g. telecommunication industry, financial services, or automotive industry). The increasing complexity of configurable products and services necessitated improved expressiveness and maintainability of knowledge representation languages empowering the development and maintenance of large and complex configuration knowledge bases. Within the context of such configuration projects, the effective integration of effort estimation techniques considering the peculiarities of configuration system development is still an open issue. We discuss the application of Function Point Analysis (FPA) (a standard Software Engineering method for determining implementation efforts) in the context of knowledge-based configuration projects and present a framework for a company-specific implementation. Significance: extension of the scope of Software Engineering effort estimation approaches to the development of knowledge-based configuration systems.