What are Software Metrics?
Software metric is a measure of software features that can be measured or counted. Within the software development process, software metrics relate to four management functions: planning, organizing, controlling, and improving.
In software project management, we are primarily concerned with productivity and quality metrics. There are four reasons for measuring software processes, products, and resources: characterization, evaluation, prediction, and optimization.
Key Process and Project Metric Groups
Project managers have a wide range of metrics from which they can choose. The most commonly used measures can be classified into the following groups:
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Process Metrics
These are the metrics that relate to processing quality. They are used to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of various processes.
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Project Metrics
These are metrics that relate to Project Quality. They are used to quantify defects, cost, schedule, productivity and estimation of various project resources and deliverables.
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Product Metrics
These are metrics that pertain to Product Quality. They are used to measure cost, quality, and the product’s time-to-market.
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Organizational Metrics
These metrics measure the impact of organizational economics, employee satisfaction, communication, and organizational growth factors of the project.
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Software Development Metrics Examples
These metrics enable management to understand the quality of the software, the productivity of the development team, code complexity, customer satisfaction, agile process, and operational metrics.
