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Chapter 7
Metrics for Decision
Support
The Need forCausal Models
*
T
soware metrics is to help soware profes-
sionals (be they developers, testers, managers, or maintainers) make
decisions under uncertainty. As explained so far, we are ultimately inter-
ested in knowing things like how much eort and time will be required to
produce a system to a particular set of requirements, how much more test-
ing will be needed before the system has suciently few bugs, how much
eort can we save by using some particular tool, etc. All of these deci-
sions involve uncertainty, risk, and trade-os. Whereas the other chapters
in this bo ...