  A piece of the Standard Model presently undergoing intense experimental
scrutiny is the Cabibbo Kobayashi Maskawa matrix. Several different
measurements are planned to enrich the spectrum of experimental constraints and
thus provide one of the most stringent tests of Standard Model validity. The
success of this program is closely related to theoretical progress in
evaluating QCD matrix elements in a non-perturbative regime, as we need to
extract fundamental quark properties from observations on decays involving
hadrons. This interplay between experimental and theoretical progress will be
illustrated in the context of the present knowledge of the magnitudes of the
quark mixing parameters $| V_{cb}| $ and $| V_{ub}|$.
