Software Quality and Productivity From Reuse and Modular Architecture: A Case Study

We would like to share a specific case study from our work at AT&T Bell Laboratories. We were part of an applications software project that achieved very high productivity and quality. Measured in Non-Commented Source Lines (NCSL), we achieved 43,000 NCSL per development staff year. sup 1 The only customer-affecting problem encountered to data has been in a vendor-supplied software package. Our productivity and quality were achieved through heavy software reuse (i.e., greater than 80 per cent) and through an appropriate mix of software technologies (e.g., C++) and methodologies (e.g., a layered architecture). Our first major release was delivered in 3 months.