Lee Copeland maintains that most organizations have some kind of metrics program—and almost all are ineffective. After explaining the concept of measurement, Lee describes two key reasons for these almost universal metrics program failures.

Counting is easy. However, what makes measurement really valuable-and really hard to get right-is knowing what to count and what to do with the results. If your organization is mostly tracking resource usage, costs, and schedule data, it is making a big mistake. What about the users? The customers? The overall business strategy? Sharing the lessons he has learned from fighting-and surviving-many software measurement battles, Ed Weller offers a step-by-step approach for implementing a practical and valuable metrics program. After understanding what measures are most important to the business strategy and all stakeholders, the next step is to decide what data supports those measures and how to capture it. With data in hand, you can create simple and informative ways to make the resulting metrics visible and easy to digest. The biggest challenges-avoidance, disbelief, and rationalization-come next.

When testing a system, one question that always arises is, “How much of the system have we tested?” Coverage is defined as the ratio of “what has been tested” to “what there is to test.” One of the basic coverage metrics is requirements coverage-measuring the percentage of the requirements that have been tested. Unfortunately, the requirements coverage metric comes with some serious difficulties: Requirements are difficult to count; they are ideas, not physical things, and come in different formats, sizes, and quality levels. In addition, making a complete count of “what there is to test” is impossible in today’s hyper-complex systems. The imprecision of this metric makes it unreliable or even undefined and unusable. What is a test manager to do?

In large financial institutions, treasury departments-specialized teams of traders and experts in liquidity, risk, accounting, financial forecasting, and quantitative analysis-manage the organization’s wealth and financial risk. These departments require large, complex, third-party software products that must change often to support the treasury’s complicated business processes. Matt Callanan describes how a team of developers and operations staff-the DevOps team-applied agile principles to the “last mile” and reduced software deployment from one week to one day. He discusses how their DevOps team collaborated to develop automation solutions to support ongoing deployment activities and solve many issues in the operational environment.