Getting What You Measure

The article discusses whether software metrics are helpful tools or whether they are a waste of time. For the past 11 years, the Software Improvement Group has advised hundreds of organizations concerning software development and risk management on the basis of software metrics. Metric in a bubble; treating the metric; One-track metric; and metrics galore are the four pitfalls that programmers encounter when using software metrics in a project management setting. Software metrics can be measured on different views of a software system. Assuming the code base contains only the code of the current project, software product metrics establish a ground truth. The usefulness of a single data point of a metric is limited. Knowing that a system is 100,000 LOC is meaningless by itself, since the number alone does not explain if the system is large or small.