Development of a prototype for multidimensional performance management in software engineering

Managing performance is an important, and difficult, topic, and tools are needed to help organizations manage their performance. Understanding, and improving performance is an important problem. Performance management has become more and more important for organizations, and managers are always on the lookout for better solutions to manage performance within their organizations. One of the most important consequences of not having a Performance Management Framework (PMF) in place is the difficulty of differentiating organizational success from failure over time. Performance Management Frameworks have become important to organizations that need to plan, monitor, control, and improve their decisions. Use of a PMF can show an organization how it is performing and indicate whether or not an organization is going in the right direction to achieve its objectives. Over the years, several frameworks have been developed to address the management of organizational assets, both tangible and intangible. Performance measurement has always mostly been focused on the economic viewpoint. The framework developed by Kaplan and Norton adds three other viewpoints to this, and this addition represents a significant improvement to PMFs. The PMFs currently proposed do not meet the analytical requirements of software engineering management when various viewpoints must be taken into account concurrently. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the underlying quantitative data are multidimensional, and so the usual two- and three-dimensional approaches to visualization are generally not sufficient to represent such models. Organizations vary considerably in the wide variety of viewpoints that influence their performance, and every organization has their own viewpoints that they want to manage, and which must be represented in a consolidated manner. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a prototype for managing multidimensional performance in software engineering. The thesis begins by defining the important terms or key concepts used in the research: software, performance, management, model, multidimensional, development, engineering, and prototype, and the various associations of these terms. This is followed by a review of the multidimensional PMFs that are specific to software engineering and the generic multidimensional performance models that are available to management. A framework for managing performance in software engineering in four phases: design, implementation, use of the framework, and performance improvement is then presented. Based on this framework, a prototype tool is developed. The prototype notably includes visual analytical tools to manage, interpret, and understand the results in a consolidated manner, while at the same time keeping track of the values of the individual dimensions of performance. The repository of software project data made available by the International Software Benchmarking Standard Group (ISBSG) is integrated into and used by the prototype as well