Many organizations begin measuring in the small, and then when eventually the staff become more confortable with measurement, let it spread to encompass most or all of an organizationīs software activities.However, there are many organizations that prefer a top-down approach, where a measurement program is implemented company- or organization-wide. We here look at some examples of this.
In 1973 NASAīs Goddard Space Flight Center etablished a Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) as a collaborative effort with Computer Sciences Corporation and the University of Maryland.
SEL focused first on understanding software development and then on improving it. One observation over time was that "too much data without strong drivers as to the reasons for collecting them camouflaged the real issues", leading to reducing the collected data to one half.
The current focus is on incremental improvement, and the GQM paradigm is used to identify measures for new studies. Table 14.6 summarizes the measures that are included in the management guidelines. The total cost of the measurement program is 20-30% of development costs (1-2% collection, 6-9% database, -20% analysis). No figures are presented but it is stated that return on investment justifies the expence.
In 1983, Hewlett-Packard, in response to the recommendations of a task force, that focused on software productivity and quality, took measures which lead to a Software Engineering Laboratory, which in turn created a Software Metrics Council.
Metrics standards proposed addressed five issues with metrics:
- Size: non-comment sourse statements
- People, time, cost: payroll month
- Defects: number, severity, testing efficiency
- Difficulty of project: ordinal, 35-165, based on answers to a questionnaire
- Communications: number of interfaces of lab team