Software Engineering Institute

This is the second of a series of columns on software project estimating. The first column last month gave an overview of the subject.   If you have not read that column, I suggest you do so.  Otherwise, you may wonder why I am covering some of the topics and you will almost certainly have trouble seeing how these columns fit into an overall framework.

This column discusses program size and it provides a general background for all the columns to follow. Before discussing size estimating, it is important to cover size measurement. The discussion of size estimating starts next month.  To repeat what I said last month, if you are in a hurry to get to the punch line, this set of columns describes an estimating method called PROBE which is described in my book, A Discipline for Software Engineering, from Addison Wesley.