Relativity in software engineering measurements

  • Authors:
  • R. K. Pandey

  • Affiliations:
  • R. D. University, Jabalpur, India

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Though the relevance of the term relativity in software engineering measurements may appear strange, as the term has been known to have been associated with the name of the famous physicist of the 20thcentury Albert Einstien for his landmark work on the theory of relativity. The basic idea behind the theory of relativity is that since space and time are relative concepts rather than absolute accordingly physical measurements are also relative not absolute, and that is how the principle of length contraction and time dilation were discovered. Somewhat similar phenomenon is observed in the software engineering measurements of various attributes of the software products, software processes and software projects. For example, the value of LOC metric because of no standard definition of line of source code differs from language to language. Similarly Halstead's software science metrics differs depending upon what implementation language is used. In this paper an investigation is made into such aspects of software engineering metrics and their overall impact on the software development activities.