When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. – Sir W. Thomson, Lord Kelvin, Popular Lectures & Addresses, Vol. 1, “Electrical Units of Measurement”, 1883.
Most things that really matter—honor, dignity, discipline, personality, grace under pressure, values, ethics, resourcefulness, loyalty, humor, kindness—aren’t measurable. – T. DeMarco, “Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?”, IEEE Software, 2009.

  1. CMMI (read through Section 2):

    1. Who uses CMMI most frequently?
    2. Compare and contrast the five maturity levels.

  2. Process area (CMMI) (read relevant parts of Section 6):

    1. Compare and contrast the following process areas (skimming the others).
      1. Configuration Management (CM)
      2. Project Planning (PP)
      3. Requirements Management (REQM)
      4. RiSK Management (RSKM)
      5. Technical Solution (TS)

  3. Software Metrics:

    1. Which of the metrics discussed in Section 1 are used to measure the following things? Pay particular attention to “size” metrics.
      1. Software product
      2. Software process
      3. Software quality
    2. W.E. Deming said that “The most important things cannot be measured.” DeMarco articulated a similar idea (see his quote above). Does this apply to software measurement?
    3. Section 3 states that metrics can sometimes do more harm than good. Do you agree with this? If so, give an example; if not, explain why not.

  4. Software engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?

    1. How would you summarize DeMarco’s thesis?