Determining software schedules

Improving software productivity, shortening schedules or time to market, and improving quality are prominent topics in software journals in both contributed articles and advertising copy. Unfortunately, most of these articles and advertisements have dealt with software schedules, productivity, or quality factors in abstract terms. Now we can measure these factors with reasonable accuracy and collect empirical data on both average and best-in-class results. We are particularly interested in the wide performance gaps between laggards, average enterprises, and industry leaders, as well as differences among the various software domains. The function-point metric lets us establish a meaningful database of software performance levels. A simple algorithm raises function points to a total to obtain a useful first-order schedule estimate