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From: peterd@cs.washington.edu (Peter C. Damron)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Programmer productivity
Message-ID: <9986@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 29 Nov 89 18:36:57 GMT
References: <16170@duke.cs.duke.edu> <34819@regenmeister.uucp> <16186@duke.cs.duke.edu> <31986@watmath.waterloo.edu> <16231@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Reply-To: peterd@june.cs.washington.edu (Peter C. Damron)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 34

In article <16231@duke.cs.duke.edu> crm@romeo.UUCP (Charlie Martin) writes:
>In article <31986@watmath.waterloo.edu> sccowan@watmsg.waterloo.edu (S. Crispin Cowan) writes:
>>In article <16186@duke.cs.duke.edu> crm@romeo.UUCP (Charlie Martin) writes:
>>>Why then are they predictive?
>>In the software engineering course that I took, I was given to
>>understand that:
>>	-SLOC is about as accurate as any other measure devised
>>	-SLOC is accurate to within a factor of 2 to 4 (depending on
>>	 the application domain).  Big deal, so is tummy rubbing (i.e.
>>	 expert opinion based on experience).

>Good point: SLOC is about as good as anything, and SLOC isn't
>particularly good.  My suspicion is that we haven't figured out
>effectively enough how to standardize our measures for the psychological
>side (understanding of and complexity of the specifications.)

Excuse my ignorance, but how does one use source lines of code (SLOC)
in any predictive way?  Presumably, we are talking about estimating
how long a particular project will take.  I understand that once you
know how many SLOC it will take for the project then you can predict
how long the project will take.  But, how does one translate a
specification into some number of SLOC?  This seems difficult to me.

Just curious,
Peter.

---------------
Peter C. Damron
Dept. of Computer Science, FR-35
University of Washington
Seattle, WA  98195

peterd@cs.washington.edu
{ucbvax,decvax,etc.}!uw-beaver!uw-june!peterd


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