Annotated Bibliography and References - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 446

main in 1978. Soon after, a nonprofit group of function point users was started in
Canada and then moved to the United States.
IFPUG has grown to become the largest software metrics association in history,
with affiliates in about 30 countries. All of the data in all of my books use function
points for normalization. Function point metrics are the only current metrics that
satisfy standard economic criteria for measuring software productivity. The older
lines of code metric does not meet economic criteria and, in fact, I consider lines
of code to be professional malpractice for software economic analysis.
Very few readers of this topic need to know how to count function points. This
is the same as saying very few readers need to know how to calculate octane rat-
ings for fuel. With octane, drivers just need to know what kind of fuel to put in
their cars.
For function point metrics, every reader should know that productivity rates
above 15 function points per staff month are good; below 5 function points per
staff month are bad. Readers should also know that defect potentials of more than
5 defects per function point are bad; defect potentials below 2.5 defects per func-
tion point are good. While on the topic of quality, defect removal efficiency (DRE)
rates above 98% are good; below 85% is very bad, but unfortunately 85% is close
to the U.S. average.
International Software Benchmark Standards Group (ISBSG);

www.isbsg.org
This interesting nonprofit group was founded in 1997 and discussed in the
chapter dealing with the 1990s. ISBSG collects benchmarks of software productiv-
ity and quality. Their data come from many companies in many industries and
many countries. It is a good source for checking productivity and quality inform-
ation. The ISBSG data also include data on many software development methods,
such as Agile, waterfall, and RUP, and on many different programming languages.
Although its data only go back to 1997, one of the forms of data offered by ISBSG
is changes in results over time.
IT History Society; www.ithistory.org
This nonprofit organization has goals similar to this topic (i.e., to collect data
on software companies and software technical advances). It currently has a data-
base with information on about 4,500 software-related companies. Hardware com-
panies are included, too. There is also an honor roll of people viewed by IT His-
tory Society officers as having made a contribution.