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We see so much emotional discussion about software process, design practices and the like. Many of these arguments are impossible to resolve because the software industry lacks the ability to measure some of the basic elements of the effectiveness of software development. In particular we have no way of reasonably measuring productivity.

Productivity, of course, is something you determine by looking at the input of an activity and its output. So to measure software productivity you have to measure the output of software development - the reason we can't measure productivity is because we can't measure output.

This doesn't mean people don't try. One of my biggest irritations are studies of productivity based on lines of code. For a start there's all the stuff about differences between languages, different counting styles, and differences due to formatting conventions. But even if you use a consistent counting standard on programs in the same language, all auto-formatted to a......

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