Requirements Engineering: The Quest for Meaningful Metrics: Time for a Change?

For many years, I quoted a misstatement of this quotation from statistician and quality guru W. Edwards Deming. From my graduate school days, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" has been drilled into my head as a mantra. While I gritted my teeth through many a metrics-focused activity, I consoled myself with the belief that the effort to get to some sort of objective measure-in requirements engineering (RE), defect density, the number of defects in an artifact or specification-would inevitably lead to better results. Measuring defects would lead to manageable requirements. Better requirements-requirements with fewer objective defects-would lead to better products.