Re: cobol code assessment

HeyBub wrote:
[snip]

Be sure to include the "skill inventory" of the staff. For example:

Average experience
Senior programmers - 12.
  COBOL: 17.2 years
  Assembly: 3.3 years
  JAVA: 0.4 years
  RPG: 0.3 years
  FORTRAN: 0.1 years
  Other (all): 0.3 years

Junior programmers - 4.
  COBOL: 2.6 years
  Assembly: 0.2 years
  JAVA: 0.6 years

etc.

With a view toward emphasizing the human investment in the existing methodology.

Slightly OT, but is average experience necessarily a meaningful metric? Are ten people who can claim a year each of COBOL experience really equivalent to one person who can claim ten years, or two people who can claim five each? Is ten years' experience worth twice as much as five years, or is there a point of diminishing returns?

This question calls for some handwaving: I would sum a*log(b*e + 1) over the whole team, where 'e' is years of experience and 'a' and 'b' are constants of your choice, and use the result as a measure of available skill. 'a' and 'b' could be different for different skills; for years spent writing spaghetti COBOL with ALTER statements or FORTRAN with arithmetic IFs and Hollerith editing descriptors, 'b' could be very small or even zero while 'a' could be zero or even negative.

(That's what happens when I drink coffee.)

Louis
.

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