Reply to Paul B. Moranda by A. Fitzsimons and T. Love (Book).

This article is a reply to comments of computer professionals Paul B. Moranda regarding the paper "A Review and Evaluation of Software Science." The authors of the article say that whether a complexity measure should be intensive or extensive is an interesting philosophical question. There are many good and valid reasons for the intuitive appeal of intensive measures. However, it was not the purpose of the paper to evaluate the intuitive appeal of one complexity measure or another. Rather, the authors were simply saying "Here is a theory of software complexity that has been applied to several large real world data bases and subjected to carefully controlled experiments and it still holds up. We think the theory is worthy of more careful scrutiny and analysis." They leave to some other ambitious author the task of answering "why" one theory works and another does not. It is true that there are many ways to compute the effort measure E. It may be true, as Moranda suggests, that one may choose among alternative E measures, but the subjectivity of the choice does not contradict the objectivity of the measures.