Applied Software Measurement by Capers Jones

Author:Capers Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: -
Publisher: McGraw Hill LLC
Published: 2012-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Impact of Technology on Software Productivity and Quality Levels

One of the main uses of benchmark data, such as the Software Productivity Research knowledge base and the International Software Benchmark Standards Group (ISBSG) is to provide a research vehicle for judging the effects of various tools, programming languages, and methodologies on software productivity, quality, schedules, costs, and maintainability.

The usual mode of this research is to measure a sample of projects that used the topic in question (i.e., a particular software engineering tool, programming language, or some other new technology) and compare the results against a sample of similar projects that did not use the same approach.

This methodology allows fairly granular analyses that can actually distinguish fairly small differences in tools, languages, and methods. However, due to the very large numbers of specific vendors, it is more convenient to express the results at the levels of “classes” of technologies; i.e., lump all OO programming languages together rather than discuss C++, Objective C, Eiffel, Actor, etc. separately. Indeed, with more than 700 programming languages in use and often more than a dozen languages in the same application, it would be very difficult to measure a single programming language in isolation.

Since new languages, tools, and approaches appear frequently and at random intervals, this kind of research essentially never ends and is a continuous study. In the time between the first, second, and third editions of this book, quite a number of new technologies have emerged, and some older technologies such as the object-oriented paradigm have expanded into new prominence.

There are far too many tools and approaches in the software world to deal with each one individually, so of necessity the information in this book will deal with classes of technologies rather than specific instances. Table 3-50 gives an overview of the number of software tools and methods in use in the United States in 2008.

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