Prescriptive metrics for software quality assurance

Most current software metrics tend to be descriptive with weak prescriptive power; they are not rigid enough to support a successful engineering task as hardware metrics do. We propose the concept of software prescriptive metrics, which set up specific goals to achieve, and thus facilitate, quality control tasks. A general derivation procedure has been developed and applied to derive prescriptive metrics for the review process, a key software QA task, to assure its quality and progress