Tom,

Back in the lates 60s (it might even have been 1970) my boss, an engineer and former IBMer, sent me and two colleagues to a "session" with a San Francisco-based fellow (I wish I could remember his name, but all I can recollect is that his last name started with a K) who was wanting to start a "Institute for Software Engineering". He was one very smart fellow. We, along with several others across the States, held 4-5 sessions in various places over about a 1 year period.

Back in those days capacity/efficiency were the watchwords (how Y2K came to be a problem, for instance) and his entire focus was metrics.
His primary interest was program performance at the time (including OS components) but he included some things about design complexity and programming/testing duration (mainly to keep some additional business interest I thought).

In any case, we didn't end up doing much with him, though I don't remember why, exactly. I don't know if he ever got it off the ground, but a Google search shows names similar to what he was aiming for. Some time I'll have to spend time reading those sites a bit, just to see what the field is all about now.

Jim