SoftwareEngineering_AnIdeaWhoseTimeHasCmeAndGone
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96 IEEE SoftwarE Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0740-7459/09/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE
W
e’re now just past the 40th anniver-
sary of the NATO Conference on
Software Engineering in Garmisch,
G er m a ny, where the d iscipline of sof t-
ware engineering was rst proposed.
Because some of my early work be-
came part of that new discipline, this seems like
an appropriate moment for reassessment.
My early metrics book, Con-
trolling Software Projects: Man-
agement, Measurement, and
Estimation (Prentice Hall/Your-
don Press, 1982), played a role
in the way many budding soft-
ware engineers quantied work
and planned their projects. In
my reective mood, I’m wonder-
ing, was its advice correct at the
time, is it still relevant, and do I
still believe that metrics are a must for any suc-
cessful software development effort? My answers
are no, no, and no.
The book for me is a curious combination of
generally true things written on every page but
combined into an overall message that’s wrong.
It’s as though the book’s young author had never
met a metric he didn’t like. The book’s deep mes-
sage seems to be, metrics are good, more would
be better, and most would be best. Today we all
understand that software metrics cost money and
time and must be used with careful moderation.
In addition, software development is inherently
different from a natural science such as physics,
and its metrics are accordingly much less precise
in capturing the things they set out to describe.
They must be taken with a grain of salt, rather
than trusted without reservation.
Compelled to Control
The book’s most quoted line is its rst sentence:
“You can’t control what you can’t measure.” This
line contains a real truth, but I’ve become increas-
ingly uncomfortable with my use of it. Implicit in
the quote (and indeed in the book’s title) is that
control is an important aspect, maybe the most im-
portant, of any software project. But it isn’t. Many
projects have proceeded without much control but
managed to produce wonderful products such as
GoogleEarth or Wikipedia.
To understand control’s real role, you need to
distinguish between two drastically different kinds
of projects:
Project A will eventually cost about a mil- ■
lion dollars and produce value of around $1.1
million.
Project B will eventually cost about a million ■
dollars and produce value of more than $50
million.
What’s immediately apparent is that control is re-
ally important for Project A but almost not at all
important for Project B. This leads us to the odd
conclusion that strict control is something that
matters a lot on relatively useless projects and
much less on useful projects. It suggests that the
more you focus on control, the more likely you’re
working on a project that’s striving to deliver
something of relatively minor value.
To my mind, the question that’s much more im-
portant than how to control a software project is,
why on earth are we doing so many projects that
deliver such marginal value?
Tom DeMarco
Software Engineering:
An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?
Contact Editor: Dennis Taylor ■ dtaylor@computer.org
viewpoints
Continued on p. 95
We welcome
your letters.
Send them to
software@
computer.org.
Include your full
name, title,
afliation, and
email address.
Letters are edited
for clarity
and space.
prog_6103
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