Measurements Should Generate Value, Rather than Data,

Success factors for measurement programs as identified in the literature typically focus on the `internals' of the measurement program: incremental implementation, support from management, a well-planned metrics framework, and so on. However, for a measurement program to be successful within its larger organizational context, it has to generate value for the organization. This implies that attention should also be given to the proper mapping of some identifiable organizational problem onto the measurement program, as well as the translation back of measurement results to organizational actions. In this paper, we present a generic process model for measurement-based improvement, which does cover the latter issues as well. We describe a number of common uses for measurement programs in software organizations, from which we derive additional `external' success factors. In addition, we propose a number of activities that organizations can use to implement value-generating measurement programs

owards Mature Measurement Programs

Many organizations are using measurement as a means to improve their software development and maintenance processes. A reasonable consensus has been reached about the main success factors for measurement programs. However, no comprehensive approach has so far been published for the processes that need to be in place to ensure effective and efficient measurement. We propose a capability maturity model for measurement that can be used to both assess the measurement capability of software organizations and to identify directions for improvement of their measurement capability. This `Measurement-CMM' originates from our efforts to establish measurement programs in a variety of settings. These efforts had mixed results, and our analysis thereof showed widely different measurement capabilities amongst the organizations involved. A measurement maturity scale similar to that of the Software-CMM allowed us to explain many of the differences observed. At the same time, it suggests ways to impro..

redicting Maintenance Effort with Function Points

Function Point Analysis (FPA) is a well-known method to measure the functionality of a system, from the user's point of view. Both Albrecht's original model and a local variant we studied assume that effort is primarily related to the size of a change. Analysis of data gathered on a major system over a period of 18 months does not confirm this relation. Rather, our data suggests that the size of the component to be changed has a much larger impact on effort than the size of the change itself. Furthermore, the various corrective factors of the function point model do not help to improve effort estimates in the environment we studied. Finally, we found that expert estimates outperform the function point estimates, while analogy-based estimates slightly outperform the expert estimates

Mechanical fluidity of fully suspended biological cells

Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous liquid---can be extracted from, and compared among, multiple rheological measurements of cells: creep compliance vs. time, complex modulus vs. frequency, and phase lag vs. frequency. With multiple strategies available for acquisition of this nondimensional property, fluidity may serve as a useful and robust parameter for distinguishing cell populations, and for understanding the physical origins of deformability in soft matter. Here, for three disparate eukaryotic cell types deformed in the suspended state via optical stretching, we examine the dependence of fluidity on chemical and environmental influences around a time scale of 1 s. We find that fluidity estimates are consistent in the time and the frequency domains under a structural damping (power-law or fractional derivative)model, but not under an equivalent-complexity lumpedcomponent (spring-dashpot) model; the latter predicts spurious time constants. Although fluidity is suppressed by chemical crosslinking, we find that adenosine triphosphate (ATP) depletion in the cell does not measurably alter the parameter, and thus conclude that active ATP-driven events are not a crucial enabler of fluidity during linear viscoelastic deformation of a suspended cell. Finally, by using the capacity of optical stretching to produce near-instantaneous increases in cell temperature, we establish that fluidity increases with temperature---now measured in a fully suspended, sortable cell without the complicating factor of cell-substratum adhesion

Observations of the J = 2→1 transitions of ¹²C¹⁶O and ¹²C¹⁸O towards galactic H II regions

Observations are reported of the J = 2→1 transitions of CO and 12C18O at 230 and 219 GHz respectively from a number of galactic sources. A map of the central 1/2° × 1/2° of the Orion A molecular cloud is presented. The spectra are interpreted to derive molecular densities and abundance ratios in the molecular clouds observed