For anyone responsible for designing, creating, programming, or managing a software system, this book offers a basic guide to achieve significant improvement in the quality and productivity of the systems. It explains how to control individual processes that span the software lifecycle with process-quality metrics and quantitative modeling. The author provides methods for understanding and fine-tuning individual processes, and shows how to define, measure, control, analyze, model, and improve the processes. The book contains a lot of clarifying examples, helpful rules of thumb, formulas, and cost-benefit results from actual experiences.