Information Technology Reference
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same path as older professions such as medicine and law, where profes-
sional licenses are needed before being allowed to practice.
• In 2011, the International Function Point Users Group (IFPUG) issued
guidelines for a new kind of metric for nonfunctional requirements. This
metric is called SNAP , and as this topic is being written, new data are
starting to arrive, but the integration of SNAP with normal function point
analysis is not complete.
• Early sizing and estimating before determining requirements are mandat-
ory to allow time to make technology changes before moving in the
wrong direction. High-speed function point predictions are also mandat-
ory and fortunately both are available today.
• As the software industry ages, maintenance of legacy applications is now
the dominant work of software engineers. In many companies, more than
65% of total budgets go to enhancing legacy applications and keeping
them operational. Maintenance work is more complex than new develop-
ment and needs much more research than it has received. Professional
books on maintenance have less than a tenth of the frequency of books on
new development. In today's world, there is a need for much better meth-
ods of renovating and repairing legacy applications, as well as much bet-
ter methods for moving aging data onto new application platforms.
This decade is witnessing acceleration in the use of Agile with Scrum and also
extreme programming. However, RUP and TSP are more widely used for major
systems above 10,000 function points in size.
Interesting social trends started to appear in the last decade and are expanding
rapidly in the early years of this decade. Now that the internet and World Wide
Web reach millions of people, it is possible to assemble “crowds” that focus on
common goals. The success of Wikipedia and open-source software illustrate that
groups of independent workers can sometimes accomplish better-than-expected
results. These same ideas are now beginning to deal with other social topics.
The use of personal diaries, or web logs , originated soon after the internet and
the World Wide Web became operational. The early usenet services had some
personal-opinion topics. However, in the first decade of the century, special tools
became available to make it easier to create these logs. The term “web log” was
condensed into the term blog , which has now entered the vernacular.
There are millions of blogs, and some have become popular enough to have
large audiences. The web and various blogging tools are the enabling technologies
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