There are two groups of software people who ought to read this book--those who are interested in software metrics, and those who are not]

Those who are interested should read it whether they are practitioners or academics because it is a real story full of real adventures in developing a real metrics program in industry (at Hewlett-Packard). Those who are not interested should read it because they ought to be, and this is the right place to start.

The history of whether to measure and what to measure and why to measure is told early in the book. Then the authors, in a chapter called “Twenty-twenty Hindsight,” tell how they feel about what they did.

This book may be a sort of cookbook for industry people interested in starting a metrics program. It may be a slice of industrial reality for academics. Either way, it is must reading.

Here is a complete list of the chapter titles:

• :9N(1)Measuring the Beginning

• (2)A Process Focus

• (3)The Strategy

• (4)Initial Data and Research

• (5)Establishing Standards

• (6)The Selling of Metrics

• (7)The Human Element

• (8)The Need for Tools

• (9)Some Early Success Stories

• (10)A Company-wide Database

• (11)Reflections on the Meaningfulness of Data

• (12)Graphs for Top-level Management

• (13) A Training Program

• (14)The Care and Feeding of a Metrics Program

• (15)Twenty-twenty Hindsight

• (16)A Detailed Software Development Process Description

• (17)The “New” Role of the Software Project Manager

• (18)The Final Conclusion