Software Engineering Metrics
9.6

9.6 References and further reading

A consolidated bibliography of the works cited throughout the book, gathered from each topic’s own references section. Organised loosely by theme; many works are cited from multiple topics.

Foundational frameworks

  • Forsgren, Nicole, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. IT Revolution Press, 2018.
  • Forsgren, Nicole, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler. “The SPACE of Developer Productivity.” ACM Queue, 2021.
  • Noda, Abi, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren, and Michaela Greiler. “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity.” ACM Queue, 2023.
  • Google Cloud. DevOps Research and Assessment programme. dora.dev.

Goodhart’s law and metric gaming

  • Goodhart, C. A. E. “Problems of Monetary Management: The UK Experience.” 1975.
  • Strathern, Marilyn. “‘Improving Ratings’: Audit in the British University System.” 1997.
  • Muller, Jerry Z. The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton University Press, 2018.
  • Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
  • Austin, Robert D. Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. Dorset House, 1996.

Statistical literacy and measurement

  • Hubbard, Douglas W. How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. Wiley, 2014.
  • Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
  • Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don’t. Penguin Press, 2012.
  • Wheeler, Donald J. Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos. SPC Press, 2000.
  • Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press, 2001.
  • Knaflic, Cole Nussbaumer. Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals. Wiley, 2015.
  • Few, Stephen. Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring. Analytics Press, 2013.

Delivery, flow, and DevOps

  • Kersten, Mik. Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. IT Revolution Press, 2018.
  • Rother, Mike, and John Shook. Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping to Create Value and Eliminate Muda. Lean Enterprise Institute, 1999.
  • Womack, James P., and Daniel T. Jones. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation. Free Press, 1996.
  • Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. Free Press, 1990.
  • George, Michael L. Lean Six Sigma for Service: How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions. McGraw-Hill, 2003.
  • Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press, 1988.
  • Kim, Gene, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. The Phoenix Project. IT Revolution Press, 2013.
  • Kim, Gene, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis. The DevOps Handbook. IT Revolution Press, 2016.
  • Humble, Jez, and David Farley. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. Addison-Wesley, 2010.
  • Reinertsen, Donald G. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. Celeritas Publishing, 2009.
  • Vacanti, Daniel S. Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability. Actionable Agile Press, 2015.
  • Anderson, David J. Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business. Blue Hole Press, 2010.
  • Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. North River Press, 1984.
  • Bacchelli, Alberto, and Christian Bird. “Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges of Modern Code Review.” ICSE, 2013.
  • Wiegers, Karl E. Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide. Addison-Wesley, 2002.
  • Little, John D. C. “A Proof for the Queuing Formula: L = λW.” Operations Research, 1961.
  • Kleinrock, Leonard. Queueing Systems, Volume 1: Theory. Wiley-Interscience, 1975.
  • Wescott, Bob. The Every Computer Performance Book: How to Avoid and Solve Performance Problems on the Computer Systems You Work With. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.

Developer experience and people

  • DeMarco, Tom, and Timothy Lister. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Dorset House, 1987.
  • Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books, 2009.
  • Maslach, Christina, and Susan E. Jackson. Maslach Burnout Inventory. Consulting Psychologists Press.
  • Maslach, Christina, and Michael P. Leiter. The Burnout Challenge: Managing People to Avoid Burnout and Improve Wellbeing. Harvard University Press, 2022.
  • Skelton, Matthew, and Manuel Pais. Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. IT Revolution Press, 2019.
  • Conway, Melvin E. “How Do Committees Invent?” 1968.
  • Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing, 2016.
  • Mark, Gloria, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress.” 2008.
  • Lawson, Jeff. Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century. Harper Business, 2021.
  • Rea, Louis M., and Richard A. Parker. Designing and Conducting Survey Research: A Comprehensive Guide. Jossey-Bass, 2014.

Code quality and technical debt

  • McCabe, Thomas J. “A Complexity Measure.” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1976.
  • Campbell, G. Ann. “Cognitive Complexity: A New Way of Measuring Understandability.” SonarSource, 2018.
  • McConnell, Steve. Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction. Microsoft Press, 2004.
  • Feathers, Michael. Working Effectively with Legacy Code. Prentice Hall, 2004.
  • Meszaros, Gerard. xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code. Addison-Wesley, 2007.
  • Jia, Yue, and Mark Harman. “An Analysis and Survey of the Development of Mutation Testing.” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2011.
  • Tornhill, Adam. Your Code as a Crime Scene. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2015.
  • Tornhill, Adam. Software Design X-Rays. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2018.
  • Nagappan, Nachiappan, and Thomas Ball. “Use of Relative Code Churn Measures to Predict System Defect Density.” ICSE, 2005.
  • Fowler, Martin. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
  • Møller, Anders, and Michael I. Schwartzbach. Static Program Analysis. Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University.
  • Cunningham, Ward. “The WyCash Portfolio Management System.” OOPSLA experience report, 1992.
  • Kruchten, Philippe, Robert Nord, and Ipek Ozkaya. Managing Technical Debt: Reducing Friction in Software Development. Addison-Wesley, 2019.
  • Bhatti, Jared, Zachariah Goldberg, Ted Kubaska, and Sarah Moir. Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing. Apress, 2021.
  • Ousterhout, John. A Philosophy of Software Design. Yaknyam Press, 2018.
  • OWASP Foundation. Static application security testing (SAST) guidance.

Product, business, and ROI

  • Croll, Alistair, and Benjamin Yoskovitz. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster. O’Reilly Media, 2013.
  • Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup. Crown Business, 2011.
  • Torres, Teresa. Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business Value. Product Talk, 2021.
  • Eyal, Nir. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Portfolio, 2014.
  • Doerr, John. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. Portfolio, 2018.
  • Parmenter, David. Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs. Wiley, 2015.
  • Storment, J.R., and Mike Fuller. Cloud FinOps: Collaborative, Real-Time Cloud Financial Management. O’Reilly Media, 2020.
  • FinOps Foundation. FinOps Framework. finops.org.
  • U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Circular A-94: Guidelines and Discount Rates for Benefit-Cost Analysis of Federal Programs.

Reliability, operations, and security

  • Beyer, Betsy, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy, eds. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. O’Reilly Media, 2016.
  • Beyer, Betsy, Niall Richard Murphy, David K. Rensin, Kent Kawahara, and Stephen Thorne, eds. The Site Reliability Workbook. O’Reilly Media, 2018.
  • Hidalgo, Alex. Implementing Service Level Objectives: A Practical Guide to SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets. O’Reilly Media, 2020.
  • Blank-Edelman, David N., ed. Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale. O’Reilly Media, 2018.
  • Dekker, Sidney. The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. CRC Press, 2014.
  • Allspaw, John. “Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture.” Etsy Engineering Blog, 2012.
  • Nygard, Michael T. Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2018.
  • FIRST.org. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) specification.
  • NIST Special Publication 800-40. Guide to Enterprise Patch Management Planning.
  • U.S. Federal Risk and Authorisation Management Program (FedRAMP) documentation.

Organisational change and governance

  • Kotter, John P. Leading Change. Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
  • Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday, 1990.
  • Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business Review Press, 1997.
  • Ladley, John. Data Governance: How to Design, Deploy, and Sustain an Effective Data Governance Program. Morgan Kaufmann, 2012.
  • Software Engineering Institute. Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).
  • U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Performance measurement guidance and the GPRA Modernization Act.

The AI era

  • GitHub. Research on AI pair programming and developer productivity.
  • Google Cloud. DevOps Research and Assessment programme, State of DevOps reports (recent years incorporating AI-adoption findings).