In the long term, the focus will be on characterizing and measuring software content and its quality, not just the external behavioral view but structural views as well. There will be less emphasis on cost benefits of reuse versus no reuse because using standard solutions will have become the way of doing business and will not have to be justified. There will be less emphasis on source lines of code (SLOC), especially as the basis of productivity, because more useful and important metrics of the functionality and quality of software will be available. The deemphasis on SLOC will reflect the increased emphasis on products derived from earlier activities in the life cycle, particularly design quality assessment and the general state of domain development, effectively comprising a domain maturity measure. The quantification of the notion of variations on a theme (i.e., domain architectures) mentioned above will be a more important estimate of effort than of the total size of the system delivered.