Page #139 (21.3 Low-Cost Commercial Tools)

21.4 Noninvasive Measurement

The future of SPI is in noninvasive software measurement, modeling, prediction, tracking, and project replanning. Software measurement is a discipline that persistently eludes and evades the most qualified SPI analysts in industry.

Noninvasive software measurement alleviates this burden today. Noninvasive software measurement technologies produce software estimations and predict costs, quality, and reliability. They build software project plans, track project status, and replan software projects if necessary.

The World Wide Web is currently the best example of the ability of noninvasive measurement to overcome human weakness. Web hosting services collect millions of data points, report these statistics transparently , and predict future Web site performance.

The weakness of SPI methods that cost $26,400 and $37,100 per person is that humans must manually record thousands of data points. Humans must furthermore conduct complex statistical analyses using these manually-recorded data points. Unfortunately, it turns out that many if not most of the data points are in error, thus rendering further statistical analyses ineffective .