Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 501

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Software measurement: a necessary scientific basis

Fenton, N.·1994·IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
DOI 10.1109/32.268921
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Software measurement, like measurement in any other discipline, must adhere to the science of measurement if it is to gain widespread acceptance and validity. The observation of some very simple, but fundamental, principles of measurement can have an extremely beneficial effect on the subject. Measurement theory is used to highlight both weaknesses and strengths of software metrics work, including work on metrics validation. We identify a problem with the well-known Weyuker properties (E.J. Weyuker, 1988), but also show that a criticism of these properties by J.C. Cherniavsky and C.H. Smith (1991) is invalid. We show that the search for general software complexity measures is doomed to failure. However, the theory does help us to define and validate measures of specific complexity attributes. Above all, we are able to view software measurement in a very wide perspective, rationalising and relating its many diverse activities.>

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/32.268921

Cites

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 47

  1. 10.1145/63039.63043 · doi:10.1145/63039.63043
  2. 10.1109/32.135774 · DOI
  3. neil, 1992, Multivariate assessment of software products, J Software Testing Verification and Reliability
  4. 10.1109/32.135775 · DOI · Paper page
  5. melton, 1990, a mathematical perspective for software measures research, Software Engineering Journal, 5, 246, 10.1049/sej.1990.0027 · DOI
  6. 10.1109/TSE.1976.233837 · DOI · Paper page
  7. 10.1016/0022-2496(85)90011-2 · DOI
  8. roberts, 1979, Measurement Theory with Applications to Decision Making Utility and the Social Sciences
  9. pressman, 1987, Software Engineering A Practitioner's Approach
  10. 10.1093/comjnl/24.3.258 · DOI
  11. demillo, 1981, Software Metrics, 77
  12. 1982, Handbook of Measurement Science, 1
  13. fenton, 1991, Software Metrics A Rigorous Approach
  14. fenton, 1992, when a software measure is not a measure, Software Engineering Journal, 7, 357, 10.1049/sej.1992.0036 · doi:10.1049/sej.1992.0036
  15. 10.1016/0263-2241(84)90020-4 · DOI
  16. 10.1002/stvr.4370040206 · doi:10.1002/stvr.4370040206
  17. 10.1016/0164-1212(90)90038-N · doi:10.1016/0164-1212(90)90038-n
  18. 10.1007/BF00485824 · doi:10.1007/bf00485824
  19. 10.1145/5666.5673 · DOI · Paper page
  20. halstead, 1975, Elements of Software Science
  21. 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1986.tb00299.x · doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1986.tb00299.x
  22. li, 1987, an empirical study of software metrics, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, se 13, 697, 10.1109/TSE.1987.233475 · DOI
  23. 10.1016/0164-1212(90)90050-V · doi:10.1016/0164-1212(90)90050-v
  24. kyburg, 1984, Theory of Measurement
  25. 10.1016/0022-247X(86)90162-9 · doi:10.1016/0022-247x(86)90162-9
  26. boehm, 1981, Software Engineering Economics
  27. 10.1007/BFb0034289 · DOI
  28. 10.1109/32.54297 · DOI
  29. courtney, 1993, shotgun correlations in software measures, Software Engineering Journal, 8, 5, 10.1049/sej.1993.0002 · doi:10.1049/sej.1993.0002
  30. 10.1109/32.6156 · doi:10.1109/32.6156
  31. albrecht, 1979, Measuring application development productivity, Proc IBM Applications Development Joint SHARE/GUIDE Symp, 83
  32. 10.1109/32.87287 · doi:10.1109/32.87287
  33. 10.1147/rd.281.0002 · DOI · Paper page
  34. zuse, 1990, Software Complexity Measures and Methods
  35. 10.1109/32.232016 · DOI
  36. 10.1109/32.6178 · DOI · Paper page
  37. kitchenham, 1990, Software Reliability Handbook, 333
  38. zuse, 1993, Experimental Software Engineering Issues, 706, 137
  39. 10.1016/B978-0-12-266950-7.50028-1 · doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-266950-7.50028-1
  40. 10.1016/0164-1212(81)90031-5 · doi:10.1016/0164-1212(81)90031-5
  41. 10.1109/METRIC.1993.263805 · doi:10.1109/metric.1993.263805
  42. 10.1109/32.4618 · doi:10.1109/32.4618
  43. 10.1016/0164-1212(81)90032-7 · DOI
  44. woodfield, 1979, The effects of modularisation and comments on program comprehension, Proc 5th Int Conf Software Eng, 213
  45. 10.1016/0164-1212(85)90026-3 · doi:10.1016/0164-1212(85)90026-3
  46. 10.1016/0164-1212(92)90114-Y · doi:10.1016/0164-1212(92)90114-y
  47. krantz, 1971, Foundations of Measurement, 1

Cited by

See all 501

Metadata

Authors
Fenton, N.
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Published
1994-03
Volume
20
Issue
3
Pages
199-206
ISSN
0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1109/32.268921
OpenAlex
W2122000464
Cited by
501
References
0
FWCI
63.59
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplorehelp/downloads/license-information/IEEE.html (vor)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Software measurement: a necessary scientific basis. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/32.268921
The paper
Fenton, N. (1994). Software measurement: a necessary scientific basis. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/32.268921

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.