Tools Integration for Supporting Software Measurement: A Systematic Literature Review

Software measurement (SM) is a key area to support process quality improvement and project management. Due to the nature of the measurement activities, tool support is essential. Tools can be combined to support the SM process and provide necessary information for decision making. However, tools are usually developed without concern for integration. As a result, organizations have to deal with integration issues to enable communication between tools. Aiming at investigating studies in the literature that report initiatives involving tool integration for supporting SM, we performed a systematic literature review. Twelve initiatives were found. This paper presents the results of the systematic review and discusses the main findings

A Method To Select Goals, Indicators and Strategies for IT Services

Background: Measurement is a key process to support organizations in management and improvement of processes, products and services. Indicators are measures used to monitor whether a goal is reached, increasing feedback and objectivity on judgment and helping organizations to focus attention and effort on what matters. IT services literature, such as libraries, frameworks, standards, and maturity models, requires proper identification of critical business process and definition of relevant measures to support decision-making. However, there is no clear direction about what should be those critical business processes and indicators. IT service departments often spend time and effort measuring without being sure about what the measurement results represent and organizations consider the indicators selection as a difficult task. Aims: We conducted this work aiming to answer the research question: “How to support selection of IT services indicators in different organizational levels and aligned to business goals?” Method: Considering this scenario, we proposed SINIS, a method to help organizations select indicators for IT services in several levels in alignment to business goals. SINIS was created based on concepts from process improvement models and approaches related to IT Services Management. We evaluated SINIS in the IT Infrastructure and the IT Security areas of a global large company. Results: By using SINIS IT Infrastructure was able to define indicators and an appropriate set of strategies aligned with IT Service goals in which teams could focus work and IT Security was able to better understand and document indicators, associate them to business goals and strategies and discard those ones that were not considered useful. Conclusion: SINIS was evidenced as applicable to different IT Service areas, supporting definition of strategies and indicators for members to work on that could help attending IT service and business goals, instead of working in several and unfocused initiatives.

A Levels-based Approach for Defining Software Measurement Architectures

During the execution of software projects, it is necessary to collect, store and analyze data to support project and organizational decisions. Software measurement is a fundamental practice for project management and process improvement. It is present in the main models and standards that address software process improvement, such as ISO/IEC 12207, CMMI and MR MPS.BR. In order to effectively perform software measurement, it is necessary an infrastructure to support data collection, storage and analysis. This infrastructure can be defined by means of an architecture, which describes the components necessary to support software measurement. In this paper we present the main results obtained from a systematic mapping study that investigated software measurement architectures and an approach proposed aiming to help organizations define software measurement architectures

SINIS-LA Modelos e Documentos Auxiliares: Método para Alinhamento de TI Considerando Gestão de Nível de Serviço

To survive, foster growth, and achieve business goals, organizations are required to keep aligned a wide variety of goals and strategies. Alignment activities help all parts of the organization to move in the same direction. In addition to ensuring the alignment of their strategies and indicators with business objectives, organizations that provide IT services need to maintain the quality of the provision of IT services according to Service Level Agreements (SLA). The SINIS-LA method is an extension of SINIS (and, consequently, of GQM + Strategies), which focuses on selective IT service indicators and IT alignment of the organization.  The objective of this technical report is to present SINIS-LA templates and auxiliary documents to support the activities of elicitation, alignment, and monitoring goals, indicators, and strategies focusing on IT services SLA.A sobrevivência e o crescimento organizacional exigem alinhar a grande variedade de metas e estratégias organizacionais para atingir os objetivos de negócio. O alinhamento ajuda todas as partes da organização a avançar na mesma direção. Além de garantir o alinhamento das suas estratégias e indicadores aos objetivos de negócio, organizações que prestam serviços de TI têm a necessidade de manter a qualidade da prestação do serviço de TI com o cumprimento dos Acordos de Nível de Serviço (ANS) O método SINIS-LA é uma extensão do SINIS (e, consequentemente, do GQM+Strategies), que foca originalmente na seleção dos indicadores de serviço de TI e no alinhamento de TI da organização. O objetivo desse relatório técnico é apresentar os modelos e documentos auxiliares do método SINIS-LA, para apoiar as organizações na elicitação, alinhamento e monitoramento dos objetivos de negócios, dos indicadores e das estratégias com foco no cumprimento dos ANS dos serviços de TI fornecidos

Investigating measures for applying statistical process control in software organizations

Abstract The growing interest in improving software processes has led organizations to aim for high maturity, where statistical process control (SPC) is required. SPC makes it possible to analyze process behavior, predict process performance in future projects and monitor process performance against established goals. The selection of measures for SPC can be a challenging task. Although the literature suggests measures for SPC, information is fragmented. With an aim towards providing a consolidated set of measures for SPC, as well as processes and goals related to these measures, we investigated the literature through a systematic mapping. Following that, we applied a questionnaire to three professionals from Brazilian organizations to check whether the measures they have used in SPC initiatives could also be found in literature. In this paper we discuss our main findings related to the 47 goals, 15 processes and 84 measures identified considering the systematic mapping and the questionnaire results