Software Measurement Activities in Small and Medium Enterprises: an Empirical Assessment

An empirical study for evaluating the proper implementation of measurement/metric programs in software companies in one area of Turkey is presented. The research questions are discussed and validated with the help of senior software managers (more than 15 years’ experience) and then used for interviewing a variety of medium and small scale software companies in Ankara. Observations show that there is a common reluctance/lack of interest in utilizing measurements/metrics despite the fact that they are well known in the industry. A side product of this research is that internationally recognized standards such as ISO and CMMI are pursued if they are a part of project/job requirements; without these requirements, introducing those standards to the companies remains as a long-term target to increase quality

Software measurement guidebook

This software Measurement Guidebook presents information on the purpose and importance of measurement. It discusses the specific procedures and activities of a measurement program and the roles of the people involved. The guidebook also clarifies the roles that measurement can and must play in the goal of continual, sustained improvement for all software production and maintenance efforts

Software measurement and functional programming

Software metrics have been investigated for the assessment of programs writ-ten in a functional programming language. The external attribute of programs considered in this thesis is their comprehensibility to novice programmers. This attribute has been operationalized in a number of experiments. The in-ternal attribute of software which is examined is the structure. Two models for the structure of software have been employed: callgraphs and flowgraphs. The proposed control-flow model captures the operational semantics of function definitions. The objective measurement of the attributes has been supported by tools. The validation of structure metrics has been addressed in certain ex-periments for programming-in-the-small. The structure of type expressions in functional programs has been analysed in a case study. A simple framework for software metrication proved to be useful. The validation of metrics has been linked with axioms from the representational measurement theory. The control-flow model for functional programs showed its value in the set-up of an experiment regarding the influence of the structure on the comprehensibility. A programming style rule on the use of guards in function definitions has been validated by the findings in this experiment

Using a Combination of Measurement Tools to Extract Metrics from Open Source Projects

Software measurement can play a major role in ensuring the quality and reliability of software products. The measurement activities require appropriate tools to collect relevant metric data. Currently, there are several such tools available for software measurement. The main objective of this paper is to provide some guidelines in using a combination of multiple measurement tools especially for products built using object-oriented techniques and languages. In this paper, we highlight three tools for collecting metric data, in our case from several Java-based open source projects. Our research is currently based on the work of Card and Glass, who argue that design complexity measures (data complexity and structural complexity) are indicators/predictors of procedural/cyclomatic complexity (decision counts) and errors (discovered from system tests). Their work was centered on structured design and our work is with object-oriented designs and the metrics we use parallel those of Card and Glass, being, Henry and Kafura's Information Flow Metrics, McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity, and Chidamber and Kemerer Object-oriented Metrics

Measuring the software process and product: Lessons learned in the SEL

The software development process and product can and should be measured. The software measurement process at the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has taught a major lesson: develop a goal-driven paradigm (also characterized as a goal/question/metric paradigm) for data collection. Project analysis under this paradigm leads to a design for evaluating and improving the methodology of software development and maintenance

Incorporating Software Measurement Into a Compiler

In the area of software engineering, software measurement is not new, it was around 26 years since Halstead originally proposed a family of software measures, collectively known as software science. The magnitude of costs involved in software development and maintenance magnifies the need of a scientific foundation to support programming standards and management decisions by measurement. This research aims at developing a compiler for a subset of Pascal language in which an evaluation for a number of software metrics has been incorporated. Lex and Yacc have been used to generate the lexical analyser and syntax analyser for the proposed compiler. While the other components of the compiler and the metrics evaluation routines have been written in C language. The proposed compiler was implemented under Linux operating system. Three metrics have been incorporated to the proposed compiler, which are : Halstead's metrics, McCabe's metric, and Call-Graph metric. The software metrics will be produced in the common metrics format, which is used in SCOPE project. Attribute grammars have been used to build the proposed compiler to evaluate the software metrics in the parsing time of the compilation process and to use a well-defined approach to the software metrics evaluation process

Configuration management and software measurement in the Ground Systems Development Environment (GSDE)

A set of functional requirements for software configuration management (CM) and metrics reporting for Space Station Freedom ground systems software are described. This report is one of a series from a study of the interfaces among the Ground Systems Development Environment (GSDE), the development systems for the Space Station Training Facility (SSTF) and the Space Station Control Center (SSCC), and the target systems for SSCC and SSTF. The focus is on the CM of the software following delivery to NASA and on the software metrics that relate to the quality and maintainability of the delivered software. The CM and metrics requirements address specific problems that occur in large-scale software development. Mechanisms to assist in the continuing improvement of mission operations software development are described