I agree with your general point. It's difficult/impossible to get accurate numbers. I would contend that we have a general idea. Management nearly always impose

I agree with your general point. It's difficult/impossible to get accurate numbers. I would contend that we have a general idea. Management nearly always imposes more control when it's nervous the costs are approaching the rewards. The flip side is Silicon Valley VC investing. Tonnes of money is thrown and very little control is exercised by investors, at least at first, because the rewards devour almost all costs. The programming equivalent might be Big-O notation. We don't know _precisely_ the costs of an algorithm, but we can do general comparisons. DeMarco also seems to agree. The book’s most quoted line is its first sentence: "You can’t control what you can’t measure." This line contains a real truth, but I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with my use of it. Implicit in the quote (and indeed in the book’s title) is that control is an important aspect, maybe the most important, of any software project. But it isn’t. Many projects have proceeded without much control but managed to produce wonderful products such as GoogleEarth or Wikipedia.