The Manufacturing Process of Large Software Systems: The Use of Untampered Metrics for Quality Control

The development of large software systems often reaches millions of lines of source code that are developed by hundreds of programmers. The concept of software factory is emerging in the telecommunication, computer, space and military industries. However, contrary to hardware manufacturing, software manufacturing is lacking the essential elements of statistical process control that have for decades been the attributes of other forms of manufacturing. Essential differences between hardware and software industries are discussed next.