McKinsey & Co. believes organizations can achieve efficient and effective application development by adopting a use case-use case points platform for their business.

The combined approach lays out the business objectives and functional requirements that provide structure to a project and at the same time measures software functionality, associate principal Michael Huskins and principals James Kaplan and Krish Krishnakanthan write in an article published on the company website.

The authors believe companies do not currently have tools to measure how productive their teams are in a given project but rely on input-based metrics such as how many developers it took to complete the project, for how long and how much.

Metrics based on output are expensive, not standardized and face resistance from application developers and the authors write UC-UCP implementation can serve as an alternative.

“By focusing first on business objectives and the functional requirements of applications rather than on the technical requirements, both business leaders and application developers find UCs easy to understand,” the authors write

UCPs work by counting how many times a UC transaction occurred and adjusting this information against the software or application’s technical complexity and how much of the code was modified.

“Based on our experience, productivity across application-development teams can differ by more than 50 percent and often by as much as 100 percent,” the article says.

“UCPs accurately measure software functionality to within 10 to 15 percent.”

The authors say the new approach has been a transformation challenge for organizations that have started adoption with a trial group handling a portfolio of new projects.

“What is critical for the ultimate acceptance of UCPs is how the leadership uses them,” they conclude.