A Murphological View on Software Measurement: a serious joke or a funny serious thing?

The 30-year experience from the Software Measurement field explains that a strong resistance usually comes from project team members, supposing the real objective is a personal evaluation on their performance and not a neutral measurement for a concrete process improvement. Concurrently, from the middle ‘80s a series of SPI models such as the Software Capability Maturity Model (Sw-CMM) and nowadays its evolution, the CMMI – provided a guide for realising a real improvement, where measurement played an important role, before as a Common Feature, then as a separate process (MA – Measurement and Analysis) at Level 2. But a certain resistance still remain alive also after these years. Recently, in the Management field (and also in ICT) more than “serious” books and reference guides it seems that (apparent) semi-serious publications such as the Dilbert strips by Scott Adams are referenced in technical presentations and papers as a starting point for commenting daily ICT malpractices. If so, another good source for “joking” with such serious things are some of the most know laws, the “Murphy’s laws”, originally written by Arthur Block and after created/modified by plenty of people worldwide and published over the Internet in a sort of “GNU licence for humour”. This paper tries to propose a “murphological view” on Software Measurement issues, commenting some related measurement-related laws and providing links with main SPI practices at the aim to reduce the percentage of failures in application of Software Measurement programs, as noted by H.Rubin some years ago.