The functional size of an automated information system is a defining unit with which, among other things, reliable estimates can be made for a project. Determining functional size, or Functional Size, also plays an important role in newer development methods, such as Agile and Devops.

Within this Agile and Scrum community, there is an aversion in applying guidelines described in thick tomes. Within the IT world, there is a great need for easy-to-learn and easy-to-apply guidelines. The Nesma FPA Manual for Functional Size Estimation describes in one tome three forms of counting guidelines; including the detailed one, which requires a lot of explanation and is still rarely applied. En pratique, this makes the handbook less responsive to daily practice.

The global counting guideline remains very useful with the currently used “modern” development methods. A need has therefore arisen to remove this global counting guideline from the manual and present it separately. In doing so, a further simplification was also implemented, resulting in a new method for determining functional size. In this simplification, the most important starting point was that the outcome in function points should be comparable with previous results.