The issue in measuring software performance and quality is clearly its complexity as compared even to the computer hardware on which it runs. Although much of the software metrics technology used in the past was applied downstream, the overall trend in the field is to push measurement methods and models back upstream to the design phase and even to measurement of the architecture itself. Here we are primarily concerned with the quality of the software end product as seen from the end user’s point of view. In any scientific measurement effort, you must balance the sensitivity and the selectivity of the measures employed. Quality control manager of a tier-one application vendorĪ large body of literature has appeared over the past three or four decades on how developers can measure various aspects of software development and use, from the productivity of the programmers coding it to the satisfaction of the ultimate end users applying it to their business problems. The system is stable let’s just document the known problems. Software cost overruns, schedule delays, and poor quality have been endemic in the software industry for more than 50 years.
