Software Engineering Institute

An organization's measurement and analysis infrastructure directly impacts the quality of the decisions made by people at all organizational levels. Ensuring information quality is a challenge for most organizations—partly because they might not be fully aware of their own data quality levels. Without this information, they cannot know the full business impact of poor or unknown data quality or determine how to begin improving their data. This report describes common errors in measurement and analysis and the need for a criterion-based assessment method that will allow organizations to evaluate key characteristics of their measurement programs.