Software Metrics

["George F. Hayhoe" <george -at- GHAYHOE -dot- COM>]

Steven Jong observed about Hope Creskoff's comments on software
metrics:

<<Her comment that measuring developer productivity by lines of
code written
"has been proven to be an ineffective way to measure a
developer's
productivity" surprised me. Have Tom DeMarco and Watts Humphrey
suddenly
stopped advocating that metric? I don't think so. That metric is
alive and
well, though admittedly the engineers are kicking.>>

The problem with the "lines of code" metric is that it rewards
inefficient coding. Rather than counting lines of code, many
software developers these days are using the function point as
their key metric. What's a function point? Well, at the risk of
oversimplification, the traditional dataprocessing transactions
(add an XYZ record, display an XYZ record, edit an XYZ record,
delete an XYZ record) translate to four function points.

Since software documentation is closely tied to these
transactions (whether that documentation is menu-based or
task-based), you can estimate the size of a documentation
project using this same metric.

For more information about function points, see the
International Function Point Users Group Web site:

http://www.bannister.com/ifpug/home/docs/ifpughome.html

--George Hayhoe (george -at- ghayhoe -dot- com)

George Hayhoe Associates
Voice: +1 803-642-2156
Fax: +1 803-642-9325
Award-winning Web site: http://www.ghayhoe.com

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