Top banner   Software Engineering: What Works?  To the Editors:
Decades of experience teaching software engineering and
supervising software development life cycles compel me to
counter three of the many interesting opinions expressed by Greg
Wilson and Jorge Aranda in “Empirical Software Engineering”
(November–December).  First, the authors write that software
complexity metrics, such as McCabe’s metric, provide little more
information than counting lines of code. But such metrics do
reflect the difficulty of writing, debugging, testing,
understanding and operating a program. They help users and
future personnel understand operational issues and they provide
the management with useful insight into the program. Also,
optimizing complexity by only reducing line count sometimes
increases complexity by increasing the logic load. Reduction by
one line of code does not reduce complexity; reduction by one
logic operator does.  Second, the authors’ emphasis on coding in
pairs is misplaced. It is more important that