Measures For Excellence: Reliable Software On Time, Within Budget [Facsimile] [Paperback]

Lawrence H. Putnam (Author), Ware Myers (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0135676940 | ISBN-13: 978-0135676943 | Publication Date: October 11, 1991 | Edition: 1

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 measurements and quality forecasts. It forms a common underlying methodology, helping you plan the project, create a budget, and set schedules and quality standards. Throughout, the handbook answers the management questions you've always been asking yourself about software projects, including: How long is it going to take? ... How much will it cost? ... How many people will I need? ... What is my risk on meeting the budget? ... What is my risk on meeting the schedule? Appropriate for software engineers, developers, and managers.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This volume explores the ideas that underlie the software life cycle, methods for estimating the size of a proposed project, and ways to apply the techniques to estimating "management numbers" -- i.e., effort, development time and number of errors.

From the Back Cover

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 measurements and quality forecasts. It forms a common underlying methodology, helping you plan the project, create a budget, and set schedules and quality standards. Throughout, the handbook answers the management questions you've always been asking yourself about software projects, including: How long is it going to take? ... How much will it cost? ... How many people will I need? ... What is my risk on meeting the budget? ... What is my risk on meeting the schedule? Appropriate for software engineers, developers, and managers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (October 11, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0135676940
• ISBN-13: 978-0135676943
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,569,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars They "showed me the data" behind software estimation, April 27, 2000

By 

Robert T. Merrill (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Measures For Excellence: Reliable Software On Time, Within Budget (Paperback)

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.