I'm doing some research into Function Point Analysis and during this research if found that it is really hard to find any information about converting function points into function points per time unit or man power. So my question is does anyone know how this is done and is there any documentation regarding this process? If anyone knows a good benchmark for doing this of any kind this would be really helpful.
FPA guidelines are conceived to be applicable within various scenario, from waterfall development to modern iterative development environments (included the agile ones). The difference is mainly in "when" function point count must be done during the development. In an iterative environment the count must be done iteratively, while in the traditional environment is determined by the approved functional design in advance. So the productivity may vary among various project management approach. The effort estimation (man-power) heavily depends on environment productivity (bigger projects generate bigger estimates than smaller projects). There have been several proposal for linear regression to measure the correlation. Albrecht (who conceived the function point method) proposed to perform a simple linear regression with man-months as the dependent variable and function points as the independent variable. So the conclusion is that the relationship between the function point count and the man-power is not straightforward. It is useful to know what is the cost for the single Function Point (see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274638632_What_Is_the_Cost_of_One_IFPUG_Method_Function_Point_-_Case_Study), but if you need some reference about converting function point into an effort figure, there are some hint in the book "Project Management for Information Systems" by James Cadle, Donald Yeates (see chapter 9 "Project planning: estimating"). The hints are based on productivity table (that take into account the primary programming language or the language type 3GL or 4GL and the development platform). You can find some good reference in the book "Sharing Data and Models in Software Engineering" by Tim Menzies, Ekrem Kocaguneli, Burak Turhan, Leandro Minku, Fayola Peters (see chapter 20, where is taken into account for estimation the functional size, the development type and the language type). There is another useful article here about using function point count effectively (by By David Herron and David Garmus):
https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=19795
The article reports some interesting examples of industry data points for productivity levels and Rates of Delivery by Business Area (expressed in hours per function points).