This book contains the eight invited papers presented at the workshop on Formal Aspects of Measurement held at South Bank University on 5th May 1991, organised by the British Computer Society's Special Interest Group on Formal Aspects of Computer Science (FACS). In addition, there are five papers which have been included because of their relevance to the subject of the workshop. The book represents something of a landmark in software engineering research. The British Computer Society's Special Interest Group on Formal Aspects of Computer Science (FACS) has an established reputa­ tion among researchers in formal methods of software specification, design and validation. These researchers have not in the past paid much attention to software measurement. Perhaps software measurement re­ search was felt to have emphasised its management potential at the expense of proper scientific foundations? At any rate, for the FACS group to host a workshop in this field is recognition of the significant body of formal measurement theories and techniques which has now become available to software engineers.

Inhalt

1. Principles of Measurement.- Software Measurement: Why a Formal Approach? (Invited Paper).- Never Mind the Metrics What About the Numbers! (Invited Paper).- Moving from Philosophy to Practice in Software Measurement.- 2. Formal Measurement in Practice.- Deriving Measures of Software Reuse in Object Oriented Systems (Invited Paper).- Language Independent Definition of Axiomatic Metrics.- Complexity Measures on Trees.- Multi-dimensional Software Metrics.- 3. Measurement Validation/Verification.- A Critique of Validation/Verification Techniques for Software Development Measures.- Algebraic Models and Metric Validation (Invited Paper).- 4. Foundations.- Properties of Software Measures (Invited Paper).- Specifying Internal, External, and Predictive Software Metrics (Invited Paper).- The Mathematics of Measurement in Software Engineering.- Measurement Theory and Software Measures (Invited Paper).- Author Index.