1980 to 1989: The Rise of Personal Computers and Personal Software - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 207

Software Productivity Research (SPR)
I founded Software Productivity Research along with my wife, Eileen, in 1984 in
Acton, Massachusetts. I had designed IBM's first two software estimating tools in
1973 and 1974 and later three software estimating tools for ITT.
When the ITT Corporation sold its telecommunications business and closed
its research labs, I decided to become an entrepreneur. SPR was a classic “sweat
equity” startup that began in the home.
As the company grew, it moved into offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
then to larger offices in Burlington, Massachusetts. At its peak, SPR had offices in
Burlington, London, San Francisco, and Chicago.
Note
The original offices in Cambridge were in the Henderson Carriage
building, which at one time housed an actual carriage factory. This
company had been commissioned to build the chariots for the first
filmed version of Ben-Hur , set in ancient Rome, and a working rep-
lica of a Roman chariot had a prominent place in the lobby.
Having designed proprietary software estimating tools for IBM and ITT, it
seemed like a good business idea to bring out an advanced commercial software
estimating tool.
I had studied the economic problems associated with the LOC metric and knew
that this metric was inadequate for either estimation or economic analysis of soft-
ware.
Al Albrecht and his colleagues at IBM in White Plains had developed function
point metrics in the mid-1970s, and IBM had placed its metrics into the public do-
main in 1979. With function point metrics, noncoding tasks such as requirements,
design, and user documentation could be both measured and estimated.
The first commercial estimating tool developed by SPR was called SPQR/20.
The name stood for software productivity, quality, and reliability , with the number
20 being the number of input questions needed to generate estimates.
SPQR/20 was the first commercial software estimation tool based on function
points. It was the first to include sizing of source code and text documents. It was
the first to include quality and reliability predictions, and it was the first to predict
5 years of postrelease maintenance. SPQR/20 could predict source code size for