Software Science Revisited: A Critical Analysis of the Theory and Its Empirical Support

Abstract

The theory of software science was developed by the late M. H. Halstead of Purdue University during the early 1970's. It was first presented in unified form in the monograph Elements of Software Science published by Elsevier North-Holland in 1977. Since it claimed to apply scientific methods to the very complex and important problem of software production, and since experimental evidence supplied by Halstead and others seemed to support the theory, it drew widespread attention from the computer science community.