Productivity and error rates for Ada projects

[Bill Wolfe]

   From the November 1988 issue of IEEE Software, page 89 ("Large 
   Ada Projects Show Productivity Gains"): Productivity ranged 
   from 550 to 704 lines per staff-month at the 1.2-million-line 
   level -- a sharp contrast with the average productivity of the 
   1,500 systems in productivity consultant Lawrence Putnam's 
   database: only 77 lines per staff-month.  Reuseable software
   developed on the project was counted only once, and reuseable
   software not developed on the project was not counted at all.

   Excerpts from a recent NASA internal study were recently
   published in the September/October 1989 SIGAda Ada Letters 
   (page 58): by the third Ada project, 42% of code was reused, 
   productivity was 33.9 noncomment lines per staff-day (that's 
   746 lines per staff-month), and there were only 1.0 defects per 
   thousand lines of code.  The study recommended that NASA should
   adopt Ada as its standard programming language. 

   Does anyone know of any empirical results regarding the level of
   productivity and defect rate associated with C-language projects?

   It would be interesting to compare them to the results cited above.

 
   Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe at hubcap.clemson.edu