Measures for Excellence: Reliable Software on Time, Within Budget

by Lawrence H. Putnam and Ware Myers

Book Overview

This book helps you accurately measure the completion time frames for small-to-medium software development projects, with practical techniques for performing software estimates, productivity... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0135676940
• ISBN13: 9780135676943
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 3.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.2" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

They "showed me the data" behind software estimation

This book is somewhat mistitled -- it is more about software project estimation and management than about quality or metrics. But as the estimation practice lead for our software development group I found it insightful and valuable.The heart of the book is an empirical function relating effort (cost), schedule, and system size, based on thousands of actual software projects. The projects cover a huge range of sizes and come from a variety of problem domains. This equation, together with a Rayleigh-distribution model of staff build-up during the construction phase of a software project, allows prediction of schedule and effort for a given system size, normalized productivity, and staffing pattern.The value of this model is that it is shown by the authors to be applicable over a very broad range of problem domains and system sizes. It at least has a chance of modeling nonlinear effects such as the "mythical man-month" (total effort goes up fast as you increase the size of the team). And with only two free parameters (process productivity and staff-up rate) it is simple enough to be fitted to your own historical project data without a lot of re-analysis.A lot of the book is devoted to graphical and pencil-and-paper application of the model, which is not really necessary since an implementation of the model ("Construx Estimate").The only reason that I did not give the book five stars is that it is a bit dated -- it describes a waterfall lifecycle model, as was probably used by most of the projects in the calibration set. But I think it is still valuable as a source of quantitative guidance for software project estimation.