Measures For Excellence: Reliable Software On Time, Within Budget (Yourdon Press Series) [FACSIMILE] (Paperback)

by Lawrence H. Putnam (Author), Ware Meyers (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; Facsimile edition (October 11, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0135676940
• ISBN-13: 978-0135676943
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 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.com Sales Rank: #707,994 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 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 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.