Reverse engineering Function Points to Object Points

This paper reports on the development of a novel approach to bridge the relationship between function point (FP) and object point (OP) sizing metrics by reverse engineering FP elements to some corresponding OP elements. This has been applied to a wide spectrum of software projects. Two findings emerge. First, there appears to exist a high correlation between OP and FP elements with a linear relationship between the two. The second is the construction of a validated OPs database from existing FP-based projects, which facilitates the validation of existing and emerging OP-based software cost estimation (SCE) models.