Managing software process measurement: A metamodel-based approach

The evaluation of software processes is nowadays a very important issue due to the growing interest of software companies in the improvement of the productivity and quality of delivered products. Software measurement plays a fundamental role here. Given the great diversity of entities which are candidates for measurement in the software process improvement context (process models, projects, resources, products) this measurement must be performed in a consistent and integrated way. This will facilitate the making of decisions in process improvement. In this paper, a proposal for the integrated management of the software measurement is presented. The goal is to provide companies with a generic and flexible environment for software measurement which facilitates and establishes the basis for a common and effective measurement process and which is not restricted to only one kind of software entity or to a single quality or evaluation model. In order to achieve this, the proposal adopts the Model Driven Engineering philosophy and provides: a metamodel for the definition of software measurement models; a flexible method to measure any kind of software entity represented by its corresponding metamodel and GenMETRIC, which is the software tool that supports the framework.