Software Metrics: Guest Editor's Introduction.

Software metric refer only to its more limited definition as a measure derived from the requirements, specification, design, code or documentation of a computer program. These metrics are computed for the purpose of predicting some outcome of the software development process which is believed to be affected by the software characteristics being measured. Problems in statistical analysis have ranged from an inadequate number of data points for detecting a significant effect, to begging the existence of an effect by employing an arbitrarily low significant level.