doctoral thesis at Carnegie Mellon University, this is a lucid, captivating analysis of organizational performance measurement. Author Robert D. Austin emphasizes the behavioral aspects of measurement situations. The focus is on people and how they react when they are part of organizational systems that are being measured. Interviews enrich the text, conducted with eight recognized experts in the use of measurement to manage computer software development: David N. Card, of Software Productivity Solutions; Tom DeMarco, of the Atlantic Systems Guild; Capers Jones, of Software Productivity Research; John Musa, of AT&T Bell Laboratories; Daniel J. Paulish, of Siemens Corporate Research; Lawrence H. Putnam, of Quantitative Software Management; E. O. Tilford, Sr., of Fissure; plus the anonymous Expert X. A practical model for analyzing measurement projects solidifies the text -- don't start without it! From the Foreword ". . . admirable . . . We believe this is a book that needs to be on the desk of just about anyone who manages anything."               -- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister From the Preface "Some books on measurement so strongly advocate its use that they look almost exclusively at success stories. They profess to tell you how to get it right but they supply little or no detail about the consequences or likelihood of getting it wrong. Partly this is because stories of management failures are harder to find than accounts of successes, for obvious reasons: People like to claim credit for successes and forget failures. But you can learn a lot from failure. So I've worked to find examples of failure and devoted a significant portion of this book to examining the examples in search of a common pattern. . . . Understanding the pattern of failure can help us avoid it."               -- RDA

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