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Title:
Practical Software Measurement
Author:
John McGarry et al
ISBN:
0 201 71516 3
Publisher:
Addison-Wesley
Pages:
277pp
Price:
£41-99
Reviewer:
Silvia de Beer
Subject:
management
Appeared in:
14-3
Practical Software Measurement is a well-written book containing concise
and useful information on this subject. It contains eight chapters
and three appendices. It provides comprehensive descriptions of the
Measurement Information Model and the Measurement Process Model, as well
as practical examples in Appendix A and two case studies in Appendix
B and C. I did not have any knowledge about software measurement and
this book would be sufficient to start using software measurement in
your software development process. Measuring only makes sense if you
have a basic software process in place, but if that were the case,
starting measuring would help you to improve your software development
process. If you are new to software measurement, you start to identify
a few information needs. On the basis of those information needs you
fill in a measurement construct. A measurement construct is a table on
which you identify what you are going to measure. You identify the units,
the way of collecting the data and the decision criteria.
The book is very complete and practical. It is a useful book for both
people starting to measure or for people already involved in a more mature
software development processes. The book contains a lot of diagrams and
tables. Some of the diagrams split up the measurement process a bit
too detailed to my first impression, until I realised that this more
theoretical approach provided valuable insight to setting up correctly
your own measurement process. One should not measure for the sake of
measuring, but to track the development process and to take corrective
decisions based on the collected data. One should pay attention to the
fact that the underlying reasons for a difference between the planned and
actual values can be very diverse. Suggestions are given how to analyse
and find the core reasons for differences and what type of corrective
actions can be taken. The book suggests ways to consider the impact of
various decisions.
As a conclusion, I highly recommend this book, especially if your
software process has a reasonable maturity. This book will give you
plenty of points for reflection on how to start introducing measurement
to improve your software development process.