[This article, by this same name, was originally written by Grant Rule and is reprinted here with permission.] Take paper and pencil (or use your handheld, if you're a gadget freak) and write your estimate for the number of insects in an average hive of English honeybees. No cheating now!...   Read Article.

In a keynote address for the 2002 Software Developers conference, Steve McConnell listed the most common mistakes that software engineers and managers make in the industry and he referred to these as the "ten deadly sins of software estimation". I will present that list here but I will also talk about a few other issues, relative to that, which we can...   Read Article.

These come from Steve McConnell in his article "The Nine Deadly Sins of Project Planning" in the Sep/Oct 2001 issue of IEEE Software. I think this article was right on the money in terms of highlighting the common problems with project planning...   Read Article.

In general there is often a vast difference between project planning and project management; a difference which is often overlooked by people just entering the field. This can lead to projects ending up wildly out of control and for management finding out much too late to do anything about it....   Read Article.

Estimation is a fundamental project planning activity. The initial estimates of a project's cost and schedule are key inputs to a business decision on whether or not to proceed with the project. Once the project is funded, these and subsequent estimates form the basis for all planning to follow: staffing, equipment, tools, training, etc....   Read Article.

This article is based on one originally written by Richard Rosen. The original article had the longer title "Using Project Management Metrics as a Tool to Achieve Product Development Objectives" and was written in the context of the Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry. This article is reprinted here with permission....   Read Article.

[This article was written by Scott E. Donaldson and Stanley G. Siegel and is re-printed here via STSC and SAIC with permission. It is basically an article that talks integrity measures in an overall measurement scheme and I would like to get the paper some wider distribution. I have altered some formatting as well as some content, such as the equation...   Read Article.

When many practitioners became involved with using metrics of various types or being involved in a "software measurement program", they often approach the term "metrics" and "measure" as meaning the exact same thing. If the culture supports this, perhaps that is fine. But, in actual fact, there is good reason for considering them as not being the same...   Read Article.

Everyone hears about code metrics and many people seem to be in the dark about them. I have found this is the case whether one is a tester or a developer. Consider, for a moment, the notion of code coverage. A metric, in this case, is a measurement of a specific attribute or pattern of attributes in a piece of code....   Read Article.

In general, when dealing with some engineering effort (like software engineering, for example) the solution of a problem is an operational model obtained from a set of transformations applied to the initial model of that problem. What this says, quite simply is that behind each solution there is a problem....   Read Article.

Most "defect prediction" models try to use size metrics, complexity metrics, or both in tandem in order to predict defects. The evidence, however, is that any one of these three methods is usually not tenable. These models often do not account for the notion of defect introduction (meaning how and when defects are introduced into the code) nor do they...   Read Article.

The efficiency of work processes and the value derived therefrom are often things that people ask about. The first thing to realize is that efficiency is some measure of benefit divided by cost. The benefit of a pot could be measured as the quantity of water it holds. Cost can be measured in equivalent units: the quantity of the material of the pot...   Read Article.

Peter V. Norden of the IBM Development Laboratory, in the 1950s, had found a relationship between the assignment of people to a research and development project and the development time of the work being done. Further, this relationship could be modeled by a curve, named after Lord Rayleigh, the great British physicist...   Read Article.

One thing that often does not get discussed is metric dissociation. Metrics should be easily or directly interpretable in terms of product or process features. If they are not, they are dissociated from the actual work that is being done and thus there is great danger of the metrics being misleading. Let us consider an example....   Read Article.

A lot of people often ask: what is the difference between a metric and a measure? The first thing one has to consider is if the answer to this question will really make a difference to them. In other words, do you have a need to distinguish between a metric and a measure? Sometimes it really does not matter all that much, particularly for smaller groups...   Read Article.

As Tom Gilb once said, "Anything that you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all." One of the biggest challenges in using metrics is convincing people of their value. When selling various types of metrics, you should try to emphasize how they can help manage processes. You do, however, need to point...   Read Article.

This article describes the application of statistical science to the testing and evaluation of software and software-intensive systems. Engineering practices are described for statistical testing based on a usage model, which is an engineering formalism that represents the use of a system in a specific environment or situation, or for a specific customer...   Read Article.

When we talk about software quality assurance, often we are asked to think about the idea of "measureing software stability". It is often the hope of some management (or so it would appear) that there is a mathematical and/or statistical basis that is eminently reliable in this context. Various equations are often thrown back and forth. But let us consider...   Read Article.

This article is based on the paper "Faults on Its Sleeve: Amplifying Software Reliability Testing" by Dick Hamlet and Jeff Voas. It is a paper that deserves to be better known that it is, in my opinion, and I am going to basically cover here what they covered in that paper. (This was first presented at the International Symposium on Software Testing...   Read Article.

The notion of reliability speaks to the probability of failure-free operation for a specified time in a specified environment for a given purpose. This, of course, means quite different things depending on the system and the users of that system. Informally, reliability is a measure of how well system users think it provides the services they require....   Read Article.