Is Software Science Hard (Book)?

This article presents comments of the author regarding the paper "A Review and Evaluation of Software Science," by A. Fitzsimmons and T. Love, published in the March 1978 issue of the periodical "ACM Computing Surveys." The article raised two questions in author's mind: whether the effort measure is a good measure of complexity and whether the correlation coefficient is a reliable tool for validating the conjectures of software science. Article's abstract states that software science's effort measure (E) gives an objective measure of complexity. E is an extensive measure that is, one that depends on the bulk or size of the program. All previous measures of complexity have been intensive that is, they depend on the internal structure. Examples include the relative frequencies of branching statements and calls, or a normalized to unity spectrum of program's listing across indenture levels, or a cyclomatic measure of program's loop and nesting structure. Indeed, T.J. McCabe, a software engineer has expressed skepticism of extensive measures.