ABSTRACT
It is very easy to think of attributes of computer software products or processes that can be measured. It is also very easy to identify properties of people and programming environments that can easily be measured. Measurement in and of itself is not the real problem. The real problem is identifying meaningful attributes to measure and then finding measurement processes to produce reliable and reproducible assessments of these attributes. One attribute, for example, that we could measure for each of our software developers is that of height. Clearly, every one of our developers occupies some physical space in this universe, so we should be able to measure the height of these people handily. Indeed, there are plenty of tools that we have at hand that will provide satisfactory measurement data for us once we have decided what level of accuracy is required. If we only require accuracy to
±
1 centimeter, we could easily acquire a suitable measurement tool, a tape measure, obtained from the local hardware store to do the job for us.
