Process and Project Metrics in Software management

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:

1. Process Metrics

   These are the metrics that relate to processing quality. They are used to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of various processes.

2. 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.

3. Product Metrics

   These are metrics that pertain to Product Quality. They are used to measure cost, quality, and the product’s time-to-market.

4. Organizational Metrics

   These metrics measure the impact of organizational economics, employee satisfaction, communication, and organizational growth factors of the project.

5. 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.