THE EFFECT OF OBJECT-ORIENTED FRAMEWORKS ON DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY

How much will it cost?'' ''How long will it take?'' These questions ar e notoriously difficult to answer accurately and early in software dev elopment. Software metrics tackle this problem by assuming a statistic al correlation between the size of a software project and the amount o f effort typically required to realize it. To be useful in estimating cost, a size metric must take into account the inherent complexity of the system. Such metrics have been applied with varying degrees of suc cess, but the nature of software development has been changing, and so me of the assumptions behind the established cost-estimation technique s are slowly being invalidated. The System Meter (SM) is a new softwar e sizing approach based on the notion of system description. System de scriptions encompass all kinds of software artifacts, from requirement documents to final code. For each kind or level of artifacts, there i s a corresponding flavor of SM. In our studies we used the first opera tional flavor, the SM at the preliminary analysis level, or Pre-SM. In contrast to the well-known Function Point (FP) metric, which is measu rable after the more detailed but costly phase of domain analysis only , the SM explicitly takes OO concepts into account. It also distinguis hes between components to be developed and those to be reused, thus re flecting the idea of incremental functionality. In this article we pre sent results of a field study of 36 projects developed using object te chnology. We measured both FP and the Pre-SM method in all 36 projects and compared their correlation to the development effort.