The paper Validation of an Approach for Improving Existing Measurement Frameworks by
Manoel G. Mendonça and Victor R. Basili reports their experience in validating and improving measurement frameworks used by companies.

In particular, they are mining the data gathered by the frameworks for interesting latent information using attribute focusing. Also, they are using GQM to structure the measuring activity.

The paper also contains links to several good background papers on software measurement techniques and their validation.