Software developers are faced with the challenge of making software
systems and products of ever greater quality and safety, while at the
same time being faced with the growing pressure of costs reduction in
order to gain and maintain competitive advantages. As in any scientific
and engineering discipline, reliable measurement is essential for
talking on such a challenge. "Software measurement is an excellent
abstraction mechanism for learning what works and what doesn't" (Victor
Basili). Measurement of both software process and products provides a
large amount of basic information for the evaluation of the software
development processes or the software products themselves. Examples of
recent successes in software measurement span multiple areas, such as
evaluation of new development methods and paradigms, quality and
management improvement programs, tool-supporting initiatives and
company- wide measurement programs. The German Computer Science Interest
(GI) Group of Software Metrics and the Canadian Interest Group in
Software Metrics (CIM) have attended to these concerns in the recent
years. Research initiatives were directed initially to the definition of
software metrics and then to validation of the software metrics
themselves. This was followed by more and more investigation into
practical applications of software metrics and by critical analysis of
the benefits and weaknesses of software measurement programs. Key
findings in this area of software engineering have been published in
some important books, such as Dumke and Zuse's Theory and Practice of
Software Measurement, Ebert and Dumke's Software Metrics in Practice and
Lehner, Dumke and Abran's Software Metrics.
