Perceptions & Realities is a quarterly newsletter that provides practical and concise advice on how to manage customer expectations, deliver savvy service, communicate effectively and build win-win relationships. This issue talks about client relations, a tip for strategic planning, listening to customers/coworkers, evaluating SLAs, and more.

Effective requirements management includes selective requirements measurement. You can make sure your project is staying on track by counting the number of requirements you plan to implement and tracking their status during construction. You can stay focused on meeting delivery targets by monitoring requirements change requests. You can even estimate future projects better by tracking the time you spend on requirements engineering and correlating requirements definitions with development effort. Or alternatively, you could just ship the product when it "feels" done. It's your choice.

This paper reports the results of KLCI's third worldwide survey of software metrics practices, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2000. Areas examined include metrics used, criteria for selecting metrics, tool usage and satisfaction, and year-over-year changes in metrics practices.

Are you a tester who is particularly good at finding "the weakest link" in code? Are you a developer who has been impressed with a tester's uncanny ability to hone in on weak code? This skill is probably more a matter of organizational understanding and observation than intuition. In this column, Bret Pettichord explains how to use communication factors to predict problem areas in code (and how to avoid letting those same observations draw you into unwanted territory).