Beat the Odds in Vega$: Measurement Theory Applied to Development and Testing

James McCaffrey describes in detail how to use measurement theory to create a simple software system that predicts with 87 percent accuracy the results of NFL professional football game scores. So, what does this have to do with a conference about developing better software? You can apply the same measurement theory principles embedded in this program to more accurately predict or compare results of software development, testing, and management. Using the information James presents, you can extend the system to predict the scores in other sports and apply the principles to a wide range of software engineering problems such as predicting the Web site usage in a new system, evaluating the overall quality of similar systems, and much more.

• Why the statistical approach does not work for making some accurate predictions
• Measurement theory to predict and compare
• How to use rank order centroids to compare the quality of similar software applications