Editor's Corner: At last - some measured results of the "structured revolution"
So, according to DeMarco and Lister, contemporary code, as measured by both its structure and its modularity, is in well-structured shape. It’s not su~rising that there have been few quantitative answers, of course. Even in the middle of the revolution, when few, if any, software developers in the United States escaped from a training course or three in how to do it, few quantitative studies were conducted in what gains it produced, and those that were, were inconclusive and ineffective. In fact, there was a study that showed that there had been no good studies. Iris Vessey and Ron Weber published the results of a literature survey that found that the only quantitative studies that had been conducted were “equivocal” because the underlying theory was “~dimentary and inadequate.” They didn’t say there wasn’t any benefit. They simply said no one knew what the benefit was. And that’s too bad. And what of the second answer? It is similar to the first. In a survey reported in the September 1989 issue of Software Maintenance News, respondents at 100 U.S. mainframe sites, in listing the main problems of maintenance, found “code is too unstructured” to be a nearly nonexistent problem. In a list of six problems, “difficulty in attracting good personnel” was the leading problem, and unstructured code tied for last. Even more impressive was the distance between the problems43% saw “personnel” as the main problem, and only 19% saw it as unstructured code. The answer, then, seems clear-the structured revolution succeeded in largely eliminating the problem of unstructured software. And that’s good news indeed.