Talking with a couple of specialists often brings a lot of enthousiasm and optimism. There r numerous possibilities to improve and it seems that the only way to go is just do it! So, why is it so difficult then? Well, as I already tried to explain in , measures often conflict. To get better from a professional PoV, u have to spend money making a function point more expensive for the time being. And vice versa.
Secondly. coz a good deployment often seems to be very expensive in the short term. Development of a measure is usually a pretty simple task but making it all work with a large # of people and keep it consistent is a little more difficult.
Thirdly, there r as many improvement ideas as there r people in IT. Everybody has an opinion about it and often proposed measures show a good resemblance but the "specialists" keep arguing about details. Sometimes discussions with a # of these guru's look a bit like the religious wars in the last centuries . Discussions about measures go back and forth, priorities are constantly open to questions and sometimes a well deployed measure is simply ignored and replaced by another one. So it's more or less a cultural problem in a profession that has not reached a certain level of maturity yet compared to other professions and industries. May be we're still in the phase of IT-monopoly ignoring the necessity to industrialize fast.
And last but not least, the market demands, internally or externally. The question "How much for a function-point?" (read Size does matter for elaboration on this) is important in this. New applications to serve new business opportunties can only be build with a sound business case. In the services industry the competition sets the bar. Although "more for less" is the game continuously, the pace is the trick.
Technology advances fast. Getting seriously hearing impaired, I can't wait for any solution to restore my communication. A little byond the horizon, solutions appear like DNA-manipulation, transplantation, cochlear implants or even a direct connection to the brain. From my point of view developments are way too slow but looking on a more larger scale, my little 13 year old nephew, will probably not experience the hazzards I am in. In a about 50 years from now people will have all sorts of devices to restore what they lost as a 100% healthy person. Visual and audio implants, a chip in the head to avoid epileptic attacks, artificial heart, kidney, liver and lungs, sort of brain-pacemaker to stay at ease and a computer in the back to be able to walk and run again after a serious motor-cycle accident and may be a lot more. That a person is still human is probably proved by the fact that there is still some flesh and blood and probably a mother claiming a birth a while ago. To make things not too complicated, let's skip the problems of discrimination for a moment.
Of course the answer to the question "How much for a function point"? is "That depends!" . And then a lot of details about technology, functional complexity, environment, non-functional requirements etc etc etc are brought up. A discussion that never comes to an answer. However, there is one thing that seems to be independent of surrounding aspects: Size. Some caution has to be taken, very very small systems seem to be a bit unpredictable. Probably due to the fact that a lot of problems seemed to be easy on first sight but user handling, data-gathering or accuracy are often undervalued. Above 50 function points or so, estimation gets a bit reliable until above 7 to 8000 where things are apparantly getting out of hand very often.
But even between those borders there is some statistical variety. There is a sinusoid curve expressing that the return of investment for doing things by the book needs a certain economy of scale. Not very suprising of course but sales and purchase people often overlook this factor. Selling or buying 10000 FP's in 4 chunks of 2500 is very diff compared to 20 chunks of 500. Of course when this is all done within one "software factory", a lot of difficulties are ironed out but even then a straight line (ignoring all other influences) doesn't appear in real life. Obviously starting and stopping a project has its costs. Also sub-optimal use of "overhead" functions is very difficult to eliminate. Unfortunately the functional size often is a given factor unless this is taken into consideration during business planning and budgetting.
These days there is a continuous discussion around Intellectual Property Right (IPR) and the financial value of content. Well, to start with the reality of today, IPR has had it's time . Content lost it's power to generate money by itself. There is only one way to get revenue from it and that by adding value, a service. Think of the willingness to pay 150 Euros for a Rolling Stones concert. Being there live is obviously of endless value. Much more than having a CD. Or another example, the possession and ownership of a signed photograph or original painting has much more (e.g. emotional) value then having a reproduction or copy on a (hard)disk.
Very good software appears in the open source domain, musicians publish their music directly on the net for free download, modern writers have their blogs, wiki's are the replacement of proprietary knowledge bases and so on. Think about this: the content of some magazines is actually almost free. The costs to create the magazine exceeds the price u r paying for it by far. But, it's not a market of ppl buying magazines, it's a market of companies buying advertisement space and access to potential buyers of their products. That's the real money flow.
My recent trip to Mumbai confirmed again what i already knew: the people in India are very very good. Well, that brings us a lot of opportunities actually. First of all, it enables us here to bring more work to India than we might have expected up until now creating more value for money for our clients. Secondly, it creates other carreer possibilities for locals. More differentation, growth, choice and distinction.
Personally i think there are no exceptions regarding the type of work to be off-shored. Everything can be offshored. Even creative, scientific, or management tasks. The funny thing is, in fact there is no offshore or onshore. There is also nothing like a "frontoffice" or "backoffice". By strictly seperating these functions u'll miss the point in being global. For instance, sometimes design is better done locally due to the need of close communication with the client. But for other functionallity of the same application the work might be better performed in another region simply for example coz the knowledge and experience is far superior over there.
Talking with a couple of specialists often brings a lot of enthousiasm and optimism. There r numerous possibilities to improve and it seems that the only way to go is just do it! 
So, why is it so difficult then? Well, as I already tried to explain in , measures often conflict. To get better from a professional PoV, u have to spend money making a function point more expensive for the time being. And vice versa.
. Discussions about measures go back and forth, priorities are constantly open to questions and sometimes a well deployed measure is simply ignored and replaced by another one. So it's more or less a cultural problem in a profession that has not reached a certain level of maturity yet compared to other professions and industries. May be we're still in the phase of IT-monopoly ignoring the necessity to industrialize fast.
Technology advances fast. Getting seriously hearing impaired, I can't wait for any solution to restore my communication. A little byond the horizon, solutions appear like DNA-manipulation, transplantation, cochlear implants or even a direct connection to the brain. From my point of view developments are way too slow but looking on a more larger scale, my little 13 year old nephew, will probably not experience the hazzards I am in. In a about 50 years from now people will have all sorts of devices to restore what they lost as a 100% healthy person. Visual and audio implants, a chip in the head to avoid epileptic attacks, artificial heart, kidney, liver and lungs, sort of brain-pacemaker to stay at ease and a computer in the back to be able to walk and run again after a serious motor-cycle accident and may be a lot more. That a person is still human is probably proved by the fact that there is still some flesh and blood and probably a mother claiming a birth a while ago. To make things not too complicated, let's skip the problems of discrimination for a moment.
Of course the answer to the question "How much for a function point"? is "That depends!" 
These days there is a continuous discussion around Intellectual Property Right (IPR) and the financial value of content. Well, to start with the reality of today, IPR has had it's time 
. Content lost it's power to generate money by itself. There is only one way to get revenue from it and that by adding value, a service. Think of the willingness to pay 150 Euros for a Rolling Stones concert. Being there live is obviously of endless value. Much more than having a CD. Or another example, the possession and ownership of a signed photograph or original painting has much more (e.g. emotional) value then having a reproduction or copy on a (hard)disk.
My recent trip to 
