Software Metrics (Con't from page 7)

all index tags, and ON KEY LABEL events. It then

allows the developer to document all of these items,

perform application wide analysis of components,

export tables for reindexing and on-line help, and

also print technical documentation.

I hope these two techniques discussed above, help

developers in realizing what must be done in order

to provide near defect free software. The field of

software metrics is far more involved than what is

presented here. But I hope this has at least made

more people aware of the topic and what it can do

for us as developers. Without some hard numbers

to back up the normal testing procedure, something

is bound to be missed.

I highly recommend the following books for people

interested in reading more about this topic:

1.

“Decline and Fall of the American Program-

mer’, Ed Yourdon,

Yourdon Press, 1993

2.

“Cleanroom Approach to Software Develop-

ment”, Mike Dyer, Wiley & Sons

If you have any problems, or would like to discuss

these issues further, please contact me at SHL

SystemHouse:

(508)229-4884, CIS: 72540,140, or

Internet:

hchattaway@shl.com

[SHL SystemHouse is one of the worlds largest

systems integration companies in North America.]

Out and About (Con? from page 4)

create jobs, and the place with the best trained,

most entrepreneurial work force.”

No matter what your political views, if you agree or

not with Gingrich on other issues, this proposal

could prove to be the key to unlocking at least some

of the chains that keep consultants from prospering,

or at least making a decent living, and others from

entering the market.

Write to your representatives and urge them to

support the provision in HR-9 (The Job Creation and

Wage Enhancement Act of 1995) that will help

those who work in home offices. Hopefully, they

deserve the same breaks as large corporations.

dBase for Windows (Con't from page 4)

you the peace of mind that you haven’t left logic

bombs in the middle of some rarely used branch of

your program. It’s a feature we could use in FoxPro.

Visual FoxPro will require 12 or 16Mb of Ram to run

acceptably. There are times that you just can’t get

your clients to put 16 Mb in every workstation. dBase

will let you develop Object Oriented, modeless, truly

Windows applications in Xbase very easily, and only

requires 8 Mb to run OK. (Do you remember when

64k was a lot of memory?)

Overall, dBase looks like a good product that would

have been a smash hit 2 years ago, and a solid

contender 1 year ago. Interestingly enough, Borland

seems to know that dBase is just too late to market to

get people to switch. Over and over again, the theme

in Borland’s video was “The smartest upgrade for

dBase users.” The video’s second theme was 7

million installed users (of dBase.) I hate to break the

news to Borland, but I’ve talked with both developers

who are still using dBase, and they are both taking a

serious look at FoxPro.

With Visual FoxPro coming real soon now, dBase is

still playing a catch-up game. Not all of Borland’s new

developer tools are late to market, me-too products.

Watch this space next month for a review of

Borland’s hot new tool, Delphi.

It Can’t Get Any Easier.......

We’ve come up with an easy way to submit articles to

the LA Fox Developer Newsletter one that has

been overlooked for a long time.

You can submit your articles to either Chuck Williams

(72330,2326) or Barry Lee (72723,3422) on

Compuserve.

These articles can be on any FoxPro-related topic,

whether it concerns a new technique you’ve discov-

ered, a certain development technique you may favor

over others, book reviews, etc.

The quality of this newsletter really depends on the

members that support it, not just read it. And I think

we’d all be surprised by the useful information that

could be circulated around the membership.

So.

How ’bout it?

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