THE CONCEPT OF SOFTWARE POWER AND ITS METRIC

ABSTRACT
Among the Software community, there is varied concept of Software power. The term “powerful” has been used to describe Software. However, there has been no determination and evaluation of the attributes that make Software powerful, neither has there been any formal definition of Software power, nor has there been any scientific method of determining Software power. It is this problem that led to the carrying out of this research. It is therefore the objective of this research to examine the attributes of Software with a view to determining how they contribute to software “power”, to formally define precisely Software power, and propose a metric for measuring Software power.
In order to realize these objectives, relevant literature was reviewed. The instrument, an open ended questionnaire adapted from Fitzpatrick and Higgins (1997) instrument was administered to sixty (60) respondents to assess their opinion on what attributes of Software impact on Software power. Analysis of the data collected showed that power is a composite attribute of Software. In order to give a precise definition of Software power, and also to propose a metric for it, Function point analysis was used. The major limitation of this study was that Software developers were unwilling to make their Software available in order to test the proposed metric.
In this work, we have identified power as a composite attribute of Software hence, added Power to the growing list of attributes of Software. We gave a precise definition of Software power, and also proposed a function oriented metric for measuring Software power.