The most widespread biclustering algorithms use the Mean Squared Residue (MSR) as measure for assessing the quality of biclusters. MSR can identify correctly shifting patterns, but fails at discovering biclusters presenting scaling patterns. Virtual Error (VE) is a measure which improves the performance of MSR in this sense, since it is effective at recognizing biclusters containing shifting patters or scaling patterns as quality biclusters. However, VE presents some drawbacks when the biclusters present both kind of patterns simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a improvement of VE that can be integrated in any heuristic to discover biclusters with shifting and scaling patterns simultaneously. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.