
154 SOF T WARE ENGINEERING AND TESTING
Program effort is interpreted to be the number of mental discriminations
required to implement the program. Alternatively, it can be interpreted as the effort
required for reading and understanding a program. Experiments have shown that
Halstead’s effort metric is well-correlated with the observed effort required to
debug and modify small programs. Program effort thus appears to be a measure
of interest for software maintenance.
6.3 FUNCTION-POINT BASED MEASURES
6.3.1 Function Points
Function points and feature points are methods of estimating the “amount
of functionality” required for a program, and ...