Software Project Measurement

Question 1

What is software measurement?

Answer 1

The process by which values are assigned attributes of entiteis in the real (software) world.

Question 2

What is an entity?

Answer 2

An entity may be an object or an event. Software measurement entities are:

• Processes: any activity related to software development an/or maintenance (e.g. requirements engineering, testing) - these can be at different levels of granularity.
• Products: any artefact produced or changed during software development and/or maintenance (e.g. source code, sofware design, documents).
• Resources: people, hardware or software needed for the process.

Question 3

What is an attribute?

Answer 3

A feature or property of the entity (e.g. duration of the software specification process, maturity of the process.)

Question 4

Measures (or metrics)

Answer 4

A measure of an attribute associates a value (either numbers or syumbols) to each entity, in such a way that our knowledge.intuition about the attribute is not contradicted.

Describe an attribute of an entity in a qualitiative or quantitative way.

<entity> -&gt; measure (based on a pre-defined scale)</entity>

Question 5

Measurement scale types

Answer 5

• Nominal - One-to-One mappings
• Ordinal - Monotonic increasing transformations
• Interval - M’ = a M + b (a > 0)
• Ratio - M’ = a M (a > 0)
• Absolute - M’ = M

Question 6

Benefits from software measurement

Answer 6

• Visibility of project and process performance
• Improved predictability of defects or effort.
• Maximized value generation of the engineering investments.
• Transparent, fair and repeatable decisions of funding of projects.
• Optimized balance of content, technology, risk and funding
• Improved interfaces and communication between engineering and business/sales/marketing management.
• alignment with business needs.
• Efficient and effective resource allocation
• Fewer redundant projects and fewer overlaps.
• Outsourcing and supplier monitoring
• Simplified and transparent cancellation of projects.

Question 7

Methods for collecting data in SENG

Answer 7

• Library research
• Literature analysis
• Case study
• In-depth interviews
• Survey
• Laboratory experiment
• Field experiement
• Secondary data

Question 8

Goal-Questions-Metrics (GQM)

Answer 8

Goal - Goal attainemnt

Question - Answer

Metric - Measurement

Principles:

1. Goal-driven: Define measurement goals
2. Context-sensitive: Consider context/environment when defining measurement goals.
3. Top-down: refine goals top-down into measures via questions.
4. Documented: Document measurement goals and their refinement explicity
5. Bottom-up: analyze and interpret the collected data bottom-up in the context of the goal.
6. People-oriented: Actively involve all participants during the entire measurement program.
7. Sustained: Measurement is part of a systematic and continuous software quality improvement process.
8. Reuse-oriented: Description of context to facilitate packaging and reuse of knowledge gained.