Practical Software Metrics for Project Management and Process Improvement

At last! New experiences and lessons from one of the authors who brought you Software Metrics: Establishing a Company-Wide Program. This exciting book has over 70 charts and graphs from real projects that will help you to manage software projects and process improvements more effectively.

Project managers: Learn through practical examples what to measure and track, which will help you more effectively manage your projects throughout the life cycle. Learn how to measure and present progress. Most importantly, learn why you need to measure and how important it is for you to tie your measurements to visible, agreed-upon project goals.

People responsible for process improvement: Learn a useful model for understanding organizational limitations. Explore the relationship between tools and the potential for achieving improvements. Examine some of the potential problems you might face and see examples of how some of them have been avoided. Finally, discover how metrics can be rolled up into useful, balanced organizational indicators.

This book emphasizes proven practices and results. These include:

• Which software development "rules" are supported by measured evidence
• How measurement should be tightly linked to organizational strategies
• How the metrics that engineers find useful help project managers as well
• What people feel about metrics and what approaches you can take to gain their support
• How metrics are used to achieve continuous process improvement
• Which measures are meaningful for a large organization