ISBN : 978-81-963532-2-3 (E-Book) counts. Thissituationdoesnot improveevenif languagetokensarecountedinstead oflines ofcode. A good problem size measure should consider the overall complexity of the problem andthe effort needed to solve it. That is, it should consider the local effort needed to specify,design, code, test, etc. and not just the coding effort. LOC, however, focuses on thecoding activity alone; it merely computes the number of source lines in the final program.Wehavealreadyseenthatcodingisonlyasmallpartoftheoverallsoftwaredevelopment activities. It is also wrong to argue that the overall product developmenteffort is proportional to the effort required in writing the program code. This is becauseeven though the design might be very complex, the code might be straightforward andviceversa.In suchcases,codesizeis a grosslyimproper indicator of theproblemsize. LOC measure correlates poorly with the quality and efficiency of the code. Larger codesize does not necessarily imply better quality or higher efficiency. Some programmersproduce lengthy and complicated code as they do not make effective use of the availableinstruction set.In fact,itisvery likely that a poor and sloppily writtenpiece ofcodemighthavelarger numberofsourceinstructions thanapiecethat isneat andefficient. LOC metric penalizes use of higher-level programming languages, code reuse, etc. Theparadox is that if a programmer consciously uses several library routines, then the LOCcount will be lower. This would show up as smaller program size. Thus, if managers usetheLOCcountasameasureoftheeffortputinthedifferentengineers(thatis,productivity),the ywould bediscouragingcodereuse byengineers. LOC metric measures the lexical complexity of a program and does not address the moreimportant but subtle issues of logical or structural complexities. Between two programswith equal LOC count, a program having complex logic would require much more effortto develop than a program with very simple logic. To realize why this is so, consider theeffort required to develop a program having multiple nested loop and decision constructswithanother program havingonlysequential control flow. It is very difficult to accurately estimate LOC in the final product from the problemspecification. The LOC count can be accurately computed only after the code has beenfully developed. Therefore, the LOC metric is little use to the project managers duringprojectplanning,sinceprojectplanning iscarried outevenbefore any developmentactivity has started. This possibly is the biggest shortcoming of the LOC metric from theprojectmanager’sperspective. FeaturePointMetric 151 Software Engineering Keerthana P, Manasa KN, Ganga D Bengal
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