TL;DR

If you are not sure what you are trying to measure, you will likely measure it wrong. The post is aligned with the Black Box Software Testing Foundations course (BBST) designed by Rebecca Fiedler, Cem Kaner, and James Bach.

In my second college year at FER, we had a course named Electrical Measuring Technique. This is one of the reasons why I know that measuring is hard. For example, in that course, we had to do every measurement for three-time, so we had enough data to calculate measurement error.

Let’s say that we want to measure your blood pressure. Measurement includes:

• object – you
• attribute – blood pressure, two values, systolic and diastolic.
• instrument – pressure gauge

• the reading – needle position on manometer
• measured value – is the reading. Remember, this could be different when you repeat reading!
• the metric – is a function that assigns value to the attribute. This is the pressure value in the cuff in millimeters of mercury.

When we measure, we often say metric when we refer to reading or scale.

Remember, in software testing, you should always ask another party what they mean by referring concept.