This book aims to discuss all of what is currently known about software engineering, based
on an analysis of all publicly available software engineering data.
This aim is not as ambitious as it sounds because there is not a great deal of data publicly
available. Until recently researchers in software engineering concentrated on producing work
that gave readers mathematical orgasms, rather than something that might be useful to industry based on experimental evidence.
As work on the book progressed, it became obvious that the best way to organise the material
was as two parts, one covering software engineering and the second the statistics used in the
analysis of software engineering data