I've had some Function Point Analysis documents available here before, and recently finished converting those presentations into a better form for the internet. To that end I've gathered all these in a new Function Point Analysis Education Center, which contains those free documents and presentations.
These educational documents cover FPA, cost estimating, and even cost estimating for Agile software development projects.
Dear Mr./Ms. IT Manager,
As the former owner of a very successful software consulting firm, here are several "truths" that you should know about the real costs of employing bad software developers (programmers):
Here's a link to a Code Kata site. It discusses the importance of practice in the software industry. It seems like the basic theory is "If musicians and athletes believe that practice is extremely important, why don't developers (and organizations that develop software)?"
At the moment I'm not aware of any software organization that takes time out for skills practice, unless training on new products or languages counts ... and I don't think it does. Kudos.
Here is a link to Steve McConnell's Classic Mistakes Enumerated, from his book titled "Rapid Development". It is a great listing of 36 common problems that plague software development projects.
Here's a page that lists a bunch of cost estimating tools for software development.
Summary: A quick look at "The Toyota Way", and how information technology (IT) is looked at from the framework of The Toyota Way.
Here's an interesting quote from a book called The Toyota Way:
