FPA can be traced to the work of Allan Albrecht of IBM[5] who pioneered functional sizing in 1979 which derived a functional size of product value distinct and disassociated from lines of code, technology, or software language.
IFPUG offers individual, corporate, countrywide, worldwide, and academic memberships spanning six continents.
[9] The annual International Software Measurement & Analysis (ISMA) conferences, access to standards documents, certification support, white papers, the semi-annually produced MetricViews, and educational events represent some of the membership benefits.
As a result, Requests for quotations can be evaluated based on the "richness" of the functionality in addition to its cost and schedule parameters.
[citation needed] Functional sizing can also contribute to determining the level of effort warranted once an application is deployed.