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CISQ's Automated Enhancement Points Metric Becomes Object Management Group Standard for Software Sizing
[October 11, 2016]

CISQ's Automated Enhancement Points Metric Becomes Object Management Group Standard for Software Sizing


The Consortium for IT Software Quality™ (CISQ™), an IT industry leadership group that submits standards for measuring software quality and size, today announced that the Board of Directors of the Object Management Group® (OMG®) voted to approve the finalization of the Automated Enhancement Points specification. OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit standards consortium.

According to CISQ's Executive Director, Dr. Bill Curtis, "Automated Enhancement Points improves the measurement of software size for use in productivity analysis by measuring both the functional and non-functional size of software. This is a significant advance in automated software sizing that solves problems that functional size measures have experienced in analyzing productivity during maintenance and enhancement activities."

The OMG standard is available to the public for free download at http://www.omg.org/spec/AEP/.



This new standard for software sizing follows on the heels of the OMG standard for Automated Function Points™ written by CISQ and approved in 2013. Automated Function Points automate the functional sizing of transaction-oriented software applications.

The Automated Enhancement Points specification combines both traditional IFPUG-based function points with a similar measure for the non-functional part of the code, to account for all the work accomplished when developers make enhancements, modifications, or deletions regardless of whether it's done to functional code or non-functional code.


With these two standards for function point analysis and software sizing, organizations can:

  • perform software quality and productivity analysis
  • enable users to determine the ROI of an application by sizing the functionality that specifically matches the requirements of their organizations
  • calibrate estimating methods against the results of past estimates
  • measure and manage contracts and agreements with system integrators and outsourcers
  • normalize data used in software benchmarks
  • determine the size of a purchased application package (COTS or customized system) by sizing all the code included in the package

About CISQ
The Consortium for IT Software Quality™ (CISQ™) is an IT industry leadership group comprised of IT executives from the Global 2000, system integrators, outsourced service providers, and software technology vendors committed to introducing computable metrics standards for measuring software quality and size. Founded by the Object Management Group (OMG®) and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon, CISQ is a neutral, open forum in which customers and suppliers of IT application software can develop an industry-wide agenda of actions for improving IT application quality and reduce cost and risk. CISQ is sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton, CAST, Cognizant, Huawei and Synopsys (News - Alert). For more information, visit www.it-cisq.org.

Note to editors: For a listing of all OMG trademarks, visit http://www.omg.org/legal/tm_list.htm. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.


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