Foundations of a weak measurement-theoretic approach to software measurement

Abstract

Measurement Theory has been proposed as an approach for providing software measurement with a sound basis. However, Measurement Theory has hardly ever been used for building new measures. Much more often, it has been used to analyze the properties of existing measures, but there has been little agreement on the compliance of existing measures with Measurement Theory's strict requirements. This paper introduces a modified version of Measurement Theory, called Weak Measurement Theory. Because it has weaker requirements than Measurement Theory, Weak Measurement Theory may be better suited for the needs of the state of the art of software measurement. We provide an extension of the theory of the levels of measurement and we focus on ordinal scales and extensive measurement for Weak Measurement Theory. In addition, we show how Weak Measurement Theory can be used for widening the application scope of mean values. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.