Software Engineering Baselines

The purpose of this report is to provide baseline information about a selected set of metrics, specifically productivity, complexity, and reliability. It is not a comprehensive treatment of metrics; indeed, that subject is treated in a number of texts and DoD initiatives. Some of these initiatives include the Joint Logistics Commanders’ Practical Software Measurement (PSM) program, the SEI’s Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis (SEMA) program (Carleton 92), and the U.S. Army’s Software Test and Evaluation Panel (STEP) metrics. These initiatives, for the most part, provide methodologies for the implementation of metrics based on the concept of management indicators. All management indicators are based on the collection of elemental data that we call, in this report, metrics.