Toward Measurement-Based Software Engineering

We were delighted to have the paper “A Methodology for Collecting Valid Software Engineering Data”, by Victor Basili and David Weiss (1984) considered one of the most influential papers of IEEE Transaction of Software Engineering’s first decade. The paper discusses data or information on software quality and what were the most effective software development techniques. It was published in November, 1984. It was written at a time when software development was just becoming widespread practice, but it was not common to use data or information on software quality in order to learn what were the most effective software development techniques under different conditions. To try to alleviate this problem, we suggested that when people (or organizations) developed software, they should try to measure the effectiveness of their development techniques. In particular, since software is typically long-living, change data should be collected so that methods and processes could be managed.