3.4 Summary

Much of the focus of this book will be on software products. This does not mean that process, people, and environment metrics are not important. Much of what we need to know in these areas is simply not known. There has been a lot of activity in reporting aspects of software processes and also about programmer/developer activity. However, there has been very little real scientific research activity in these fields. It is the real purpose of this book to show how to measure, how to build a measurement program, how to manage the measurement data, and how to institutionalize the improvement of this measurement program. Much of what we need to know about software development we will have to learn. What is worse, we are going to have to do this ourselves. It is not possible to buy engineering discipline. It is not possible to buy a miraculous measurement program. We cannot contract with someone to have our baby for us. We are going to have to do the work ourselves. We will learn that getting babies is not all that bad. There are aspects of this process that can be genuine fun.