Some comments on the software measurement process

A great deal has been contributed to the body of literature in software engineering recently on the subject of software development processes. Unfortunately, missing from the software engineering literature is the notion of software measurement process. Somehow, measurement is something that you do once on a piece of software. These measurement data are then given to the software quality people who manage to misuse these data, draw the wrong conclusions about the meaning of the data, write reports about the data, and who are ultimately ignored by all concerned with the software development process. At the other end of this measurement data continuum is the university professor who takes these data of unknown value and origin from the software quality staff and proceeds to develop models of software development, software quality, or whatever else pleases his/her fancy.