Software measurement once an obscure and an esoteric specialty, has become

essential to good software engineering. Many of the best software developers

measure characteristics of the software to get some sense of whether the
requirements are consistent and complete, whether the design is of high quality and
whether the code is ready to be tested.
Effective project managers measure attributes of process and product to be able to
tell when the software will be ready for delivery and whether the budget will be
exceeded.
Informed customers measure aspects of final products to determine if it meets the
requirements and is of sufficient quality, maintenance must be able to assess the
current product to see what should be upgraded and improved, this course then
addresses all these concerns and many more, it examines and explains the
fundamentals of measurement and experimentation providing you with basic
understanding of why we measure and how that measurement supports
investigations of the use and effectiveness of software engineering tools and
techniques, it will also explore software engineering measurements in great details,
with information about specific metrics and their uses, also offers a management
perspective of software measurements explaining the current practices and the
looking ahead towards the future of measurements and metrics.
Measurements
Measurements lies at the heart of many systems that govern our lives,
Economic Measurements-> determine price and pay increases
Measurements in Radar systems-> enable to detect aircrafts when direct vision is
obscured.
Medical system measurements-> enable doctor to diagnose specific illness.
Measurements in Atmospheric Systems-> basis of weather predictions
Without measurements technology cannot function
Measurement is not solely the domain of professional technology, each of us used it
in everyday life. Price acts as a measure of value of an item in a shop and we
calculate the total bill to make sure the shopkeeper gives us the correct change, we
use height and size measurements to ensure that our clothing will fit properly. When
making a journey we calculate distance, choose our route, measure our speed and
predict when well arrive at our next destination so measurements helps us to
understand our world, interact with our surroundings and improve our lives, these
examples present a picture of the varieties and how we use measurements but
there is a common thread running through the described activities, in every case
some aspects of the theme is a sign at the scripter that allows us to compare it with
others.
In the shop we can compare the price of one item with another. In the clothing store
we contrast sizes and in journey we compare distance travelled to distance

remaining. The miles 4 assignment and comparison are not explicit in the example
but it clear we make the comparisons to a well set of defined rules.
Thus measurement captures information about attributes of entities, an entity is an
object or an event in the real world. We want to describe the entity by identifying
xtics that are important to us in distinguishing one entity from another, an attribute
is a feature or property of an entity, typical attributes include the area, color. The
cost of a journey or elapsed time of the testing phase, often when we talk about
entities and their attributes interchangeably as in it is cold today when we mean the
air temperature is cold today or she is taller than he when we really mean her
height is greater than his height such loose terminology is acceptable for everyday
speech but not for scientific endeavors thus it is wrong to say we measure things or
that we measure attributes in fact we measure attributes of things.
Measurement is a process whose defn is far from clear cut, many different
authoritative views lead to diff interpretation abt what constitutes measurement, to
understand what measurement is, we must ask a host of questions that are difficult
to answer e.g. we have noted color is an attribute of a rule in a room with blue
walls, is blue the measure of the color of the room? , the height of a person is
commonly understood attribute that can be measured but what about other
attributes such as intelligence, is intelligence measured by an IQ test score ?
similarly wine can be measured as an alcohol content, but can be wine quality be
measured using the rating of experts? The accuracy measure depends on the
accuracy of the equipment eg length can be measured accurately as long as the
ruler is accurate and used properly but measures are not likely to be accurate but
some arent likely coz it depends on the judgment of a person doing the
measurement.