1 THE ECONOMICS OF OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE

In 1994 the author was commissioned by a European telecommunications company to perform an economic analysis of both procedural and object-oriented programming languages used for telecommunications software. It is appropriate to revisit this study in 1997 using several years of additional data. The expansion of object-oriented (OO) programming languages and methodologies has brought with it a need to upgrade software estimating and measurement technologies. A number of measurement and estimating approaches were explored in the context of how well they support object-oriented approaches. The traditional ”Lines of Code ” or LOC metric appears to be hazardous for object-oriented languages. The Function Point metric provides useful information for OO projects and allows direct comparisons to traditional methods. The specialized metrics being developed explicitly for OO projects provide useful data in an OO context, but do not allow direct comparisons between OO projects and procedural projects