Measurement and Analysis
Blog Posts
Challenges in Making the Transition to Digital Engineering
Challenges observed in making the transition from traditional development practices to digital engineering (DE).
• By Bill Nichols

Agile Metrics: Assessing Progress to Plans
The role of metrics in a government program’s assessment of progress in an iterative, incremental delivery of a system.
• By Will Hayes, Patrick Place, Keith Korzec
In Agile


The Current State of DevSecOps Metrics
DevSecOps practices yield useful, valuable information about software performance that is likely to lead to innovations in software engineering metrics.
• By Bill Nichols
In DevSecOps

Stop Wasting Time: Manage Time as the Limiting Resource
Lost time is never found. - Ben Franklin. Driven by a competitive marketplace, software developers and programmers are often pressured to adhere to unrealistically aggressive schedules....
• By Bill Nichols

Programmer Moneyball: Challenging the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity
A pervasive belief in the field of software engineering is that some programmers are much, much better than others (the times-10, or x10, programmer), and that the skills...
• By Bill Nichols
In Enterprise Risk and Resilience Management

Selecting Measurement Data for Software Assurance Practices
Measuring the software assurance of a product as it is developed and delivered to function in a specific system context involves assembling carefully chosen metrics....
• By Carol Woody

How to Identify Key Causal Factors That Influence Software Costs: A Case Study
DoD programs continue to experience cost overruns; the inadequacies of cost estimation were cited by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) as one of the top problem areas....
• By Bill Nichols

Heartbleed and Goto Fail: Two Case Studies for Predicting Software Assurance Using Quality and Reliability Measures
Mitre's Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors is a list that details quality problems, as well as security problems. This list aims to help software developers "prevent the kinds of …
• By Carol Woody, Bill Nichols


Improving the Reliability of Expert Opinion within Early Lifecycle Cost Estimation
This blog post describes our efforts to improve the accuracy and reliability of expert judgment within this expanded role of early lifecycle cost estimation.
• By Robert Stoddard

Quantifying Uncertainty in Early Lifecycle Cost Estimation (QUELCE): An Update
By law, major defense acquisition programs are now required to prepare cost estimates earlier in the acquisition lifecycle, including pre-Milestone A, well before concrete technical information is available on the …
• By David Zubrow
