Software Metrics: A Roadmap (review):
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98.374&rep=rep1&type=pdf
On a sunday evening I've decided to settle for some easy reading about metrics and searched for "dependability" metrics, hoping this would yield interesting reading... Well, in the end I've settled for reading the classical roadmap once again.
The article is very good and I sincerely recommend reading the example about the road traffic (see the link above takes you directly to the paper).
In short, the example talks about the "undesired" behavior yielded by blindly obeying the statistics - if one wanted to opt for "safe" driving one should drive during the winter when the weather is a dreary. Obviously this is not true, but this is what the data suggests.
In the studies in industry, however, we often can observe the need for metrics, statistics, and indicators that would replace the common sense and could be blindly obeyed. However, it is (almost) impossible to provide this kind of metrics.
What I really like about this article is the set of causality aspects of metrics, the uncertainty of data and (above all) the need to complement quantitative data with other sources of information - IMHO "gut feeling".
Have a nice sunday reading...
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