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hotti hooti who. We see so much emotional discussion about software process,
design practices and the like. Many of these arguments ...
Submitted by krustytheclown on July 24, 2007
Category: American History
Words: 1238 | Pages: 5
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We see so much emotional discussion about software process, design practices and the like. Many of these arguments are impossible to resolve because the software industry lacks the ability to measure some of the basic elements of the effectiveness of software development. In particular we have no way of reasonably measuring productivity.
Productivity, of course, is something you determine by looking at the input of an activity and its output. So to measure software productivity you have to measure the output of software development - the reason we can't measure productivity is because we can't measure output.
This doesn't mean people don't try. One of my biggest irritations are studies of productivity based on lines of code. For a start there's all the stuff about differences between languages, different counting styles, and differences due to formatting conventions. But even if you use a consistent counting standard on programs in the same language, all auto-formatted to a single style - lines of code still doesn't measure output properly.
Any good developer knows that they can code the same stuff with huge variations in lines of code, furthermore code that's well designed and factored will be shorter because it eliminates the duplication. Copy and paste programming leads to high LOC counts and poor design because it breeds duplication. You can prove this to yourself if you go at a program with a refactoring tool that supports Inline Method. Just using that on common routines should allow you to easy double the LOC count.
You would think that lines of code are dead, but it seems that every month I see productivity studies based on lines of code - even in such respected journals as IEEE Software that should know better.
Now this doesn't mean that LOC is a completely useless measure, it's pretty good at suggesting the size of a system. I can be pretty confident that a 100 KLOC system is...
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