
30 ◾ Software Metrics
EXAMPLE 2.2
Table 2.2 shows that people had an initial understanding of temperature
thousands of years ago. This intuition was characterized by the notion of
hotter than. Thus, for example, by putting your hand into two different
containers of liquid, you could feel if one were hotter than the other. No
measurement is necessary for this determination of temperature difference.
However, people needed to make ner discriminations in temperature. In
1600, the rst device was constructed to capture this comparative relation-
ship; the thermometer could consistently assign a higher number to liquids
that were hotter than