LOC and FP Estimation in Software Engineering

LOC in Software Engineering:

Lines of Code (LOC) is possibly the simplest among all metrics available to measure project size. Consequently, this metric is extremely popular. This metric measures the size of a project by counting the number of source instructions in the developed program. While counting the number of source instructions, comment lines, and header lines were ignored. It determines the LOC count at the end of a project is very simple. However, accurate estimation of LOC count at the beginning of a project is a very difficult task.

Function Point (FP):

FP metric proposed by Albrecht in 1983. This metric overcomes many of the shortcomings of the LOC metric. Since its inception in the late 1970s, the function point metric has steadily gained popularity. The function point metric has several advantages over the LOC metric. One of the important advantages of the function point metric over the LOC metric is that it can easily be computed from the problem specification itself. Using the LOC metric, on the other hand, the size can accurately be determined only after the product has fully been developed.

The conceptual idea behind the function point metric is that the size of a software product is directly dependent on the number of different high-level functions. This assumption is reasonable since each feature would take additional effort to implement.