Additional Resources

Boehm, Barry, et al. Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2000. Appendix E of Boehm's book contains a checklist that's useful for precisely defining what constitutes a "line of code."

Gilb, Tom. Principles of Software Engineering Management. Wokingham, England: Addison-Wesley, 1988. Section 7.14 of Gilb's book describes using project-specific data to refine estimates. The description of evolutionary delivery throughout the book is based on the expectation that projects will build feedback loops allowing them to be estimated, planned, and managed in a way that allows the projects to be self-correcting.

Grady, Robert B. and Deborah L. Caswell. Software Metrics: Establishing a Company-Wide Program. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987. This book and the following one describe Grady's experiences setting up a measurement program at Hewlett-Packard. The books contain many hard-won insights into the pitfalls of setting up a measurement program plus some interesting examples of the useful data you can ultimately obtain.

Grady, Robert B. Practical Software Metrics for Project Management and Process Improvement. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PTR Prentice Hall, 1992.

Jones, Capers. Applied Software Measurement: Assuring Productivity and Quality, 2d Ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1997. Chapter 3 of this book presents an excellent discussion of the sources of errors in size, effort, and quality measurements.

Putnam, Lawrence H. and Ware Myers. Five Core Metrics. New York, NY: Dorset House, 2003. This book presents a compelling argument for collecting data on the five core metrics of size, productivity, time, effort, and reliability.

Software Engineering Institute's Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis (SEMA) Web site: www.sei.cmu.edu/sema/. This comprehensive Web site helps organizations create data collection (measurement) practices and use the data they collect.