J. SYSTEMS SOFTWARE 87 1990: 13: 87-88

A Foreword to the Special Software Metrics

Warren Harrison Portland State University, Oregon

Software metrics have been a popular topic of discussion in the literature and among software engineers for over a decade now. Most such references to metrics can be divided into one of two categories: (1) efforts to develop new metrics and (2) efforts to associate a metric with some measure of programmer performance such as bug rate, programming time, etc.

This state of affairs is somewhat frustrating for the potential user of software metrics. It’s one thing to show that Metric X is highly correlated with bugs, yet quite another thing to use the knowledge gained from Metric X. Unfortunately, very few of the papers published over the last decade provide any guidance on how a given metric can be applied. At best, the reader can learn that Metric Y is better than Metric Z at predicting how long it took a group of college sophomores to modify a Pascal bubble sort procedure.

While such papers are very important as the field of software measurement matures, it is important that efforts start being made to describe how metrics can be used. The types of questions that users of software metrics are really interested in are questions like:

l When should metrics be applied? l What should I apply the metrics to? l How do I get a programmer to use metrics? l How does the programmer use them? l What should I do about the measures? l Who should see the results of the measurement? l In which phases of the life cycle should I expect

metrics to be of use? l How accurate does a metric need to be before it’s

useful? l How do my programmers’ measures compare to

others?

In this special issue, we’ll be focusing on some of these questions. We’re happy to be able to present the following six papers:

l Integrating Metrics into a Large-Scale Software Development Environment, by Sallie Henry and John

Issue on Using

Lewis. This paper describes how a nonintrusive metrics collection program can be put into place in a commercial software development environment and summarizes the authors’ experiences in applying metrics in such a situation.

l Software Metrics-A User’s Perspective, by James A. Redmond and Reynold Ah-Chuen. In this paper the authors discuss the application of software metrics to a set of programs and describe how the metrics can be used to identify code that should be rewritten.

l Software Metrics from a User’s Perspective, by Khosrow Dehnad. In this paper the author deviates from the classical approach taken by the others in this collection (i.e., analysis of the program source text or development process) and investigates the application of measurement to the external behavior of a program from the viewpoint of the user of the program.

l Assuring Software Quality through Measure- ments-A Buyer’s Perspective, by Samuel E. Hon, III. The author describes Bellcore’s very successful Soft- ware Quality Assurance program which is applied to vendors who produce software for Bellcore Client Companies.

l Software Metrics and Plagiarism Detection, by Geoff Whale. In this paper the author examines the use of software metrics as a tool for detecting plagiarism among student programs. Finding that the classical complexity metrics perform poorly in this role, the author suggests a new metric that seems to work quite well.

l Software Metrics as a Programming Training Tool, by Brent J. Bowman and William A. Newman. The authors describe how software metrics can be used in the process of teaching a programming course and discuss how the topic can be integrated into such a course.

Many people helped make this special issue possible. In particular, I’d like to thank the referees for the special issue who did the job of screening the papers: Bahram

@ Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010

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88 J. SYSTEMS SOFTWARE 1990: 13: 87-88

Adrangi, University of Portland; Robbie Babb, Oregon Graduate Center; Sandhiprakash Bhide, Mentor Graph- ics Corporation; James M. Bieman, Iowa State Univer- sity; Frank Cioch, Oakland University; Curt Cook, Oregon State University; Stewart G. Crawford, AT&T Bell Laboratories; Nancy Currans, Hewlett-Packard Corporation; Don Fitzgerald, SET Laboratories, Inc.; Teresa Harrison, SET Laboratories, Inc.; Dwight A. Haworth, Texas Tech University; Sallie Henry, Virginia Polytechnic Institute; Mark Johnson, Mentor Graphics Corporation; Dave Kehlet, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Chris Kemerer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Scatty Kilboume, Texas Instruments; Taghi Khoshgof-

W. Harrison

taar, Florida Atlantic University; Janusz W. Laski, Oakland University; Ken Magel, North Dakota State University; Mike Perdue, Sun Microsystems, Inc. ; Steve Shellans, Tektronix, Inc.

I owe a great debt to all these people who gave so unselfishly of their time and energies in what is typically a thankless, anonymous job. I hope that the reader will enjoy this special issue as much as I enjoyed helping assemble it.

Warren Harrison Portland State University Portland, Oregon