Maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained in order to isolate defects or their cause, correct defects or their cause, meet new requirements, make future maintenance easier, or cope with a changed environment. Simply, a metric is a unit used for describing an attribute. They measure the progress of a dev team in producing working, shippingquality software features. In this paper we introduce a set of metrics for software process models and discuss how these can be used as maintainability indicators. Its important to decide what questions you want answers to. Software metrics are important for many reasons, including measuring software performance, planning work items, measuring productivity, and many other uses. They measure the progress of a dev team in producing working. Process metrics mean certain standards and norms of measurement by which performance, progress or quality of some process or activity can be analyzed and assessed. Complexity metrics for measuring the understandability and. Metrics can be defined as standards of measurement. Number of errors metric quantitative measure of degree to which a system, component or process possesses a given attribute. In theory, metrics can help to improve the development process and provide companies with information that makes future projects more predictable, efficient, etc.
Suitable metrics are identified and reports are developed with approval from stakeholders, and finally a toolbox is put in place with tools that will be used to implement the program process. Measurement can be used throughout a software project to assist in estimation, quality control, productivity assessment. Software metrics can be classified into three categories. It is noted that the factors of software that determine or influence maintainability can be organized into a hierarchical structure of measurable attribute metrics for assessing a software systems maintainability ieee conference publication. These metrics can help you understand how much time and work developers are investing in a software project. Software test metrics are classified into two types. Maintainability is a desired characteristic of a software component and is referenced in all the main software quality models including the iso 9126. Jul 19, 2017 maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained in order to isolate defects or their cause, correct defects or their cause, meet new requirements, make future maintenance easier, or cope with a changed environment. In telecommunication and several other engineering fields, the term maintainability has the following meanings. In software engineering, these activities are known as software maintenance cf. Nov 22, 2018 software test metrics is to monitor and control process and product. Conclusion more studies should be performed on large industrial software systems to. In some cases, maintainability involves a system of continuous improvement learning from the past in order to improve the ability to maintain systems, or improve reliability of systems based on maintenance experience.
Feb 04, 2016 software process and project metrics 1. However, existing definitions of maintainability, such as the halstead volume, mccabes cyclomatic complexity or the sei maintainability index provide. It is common for operational processes to be heavily optimized in a cycle of measurement, improvement and measurement. A proposal and empirical validation of metrics to evaluate. Top 10 software development metrics to measure productivity. However, existing definitions of maintainability, such as the. Key metrics to measure software maintainability 5 8 in the agile approach, maintainability stands for every process that goes into delivering changes to your consumers. These metrics include the cost, effort, reuse, methodology, and advancement metrics. Maintainability and flexibility at the software level are of predominant importance to drive innovation at the business process level. Consequently, the decisionmaking process about which metrics can be adopted in experiments on oosm is a hard task. Introduction one of the main purposes for developing bpm is to support the communication between the stakeholders in the software development process 4. Important software test metrics and measurements explained. Mar 05, 2020 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.
Maintainability can be defined as the ease with which a software product can be modified to correct errors, to meet new requirements, to make future maintenance easier, or adapt to the changed environment. Operational metrics such as mean time between failures mtbf and mean time to recover mttr. Questionmetric gqm framework for measuring the understandability and maintainability of bpms. Software test metrics is to monitor and control process and product. In this chapter from his book on software quality engineering, stephen h. Examples of metrics programs software quality metrics. Collectively, they affect economic lifecycle costs of a system and its utility. However, existing definitions of maintainability, such as the halstead volume, mccabes cyclomatic complexity or the sei maintainability index provide a very poor understanding of what maintainability is how it. Objectoriented metrics that predict maintainability, journal of systems and software, 232, pp. Measurement can be applied to the software process with the intent of improving it on a continuous basis. Its objectives are to define the concept of maintainability, to describe the factors influencing it and to define criteria by which maintainability can be quantitatively.
Since we are interested to evaluate maintainability during development and at delivery time, these maintenance process measures are available too late. If you want to increase deploy times and make code updates easier as part of your continuous integration and continuous delivery cicd framework, consider monitoring the. Process metrics seem to be better at predicting postrelease faults compared to any static code metrics. Agile process metrics pay particular attention to how agile teams plan and draw conclusions. Top 5 software metrics to manage development projects. Software metrics software engineering definitions measure quantitative indication of extent, amount, dimension, capacity, or size of some attribute of a product or process. Sep 16, 2017 a software metric is a measure of software characteristics which are quantifiable or countable. Measuring software maintainability is nontrivial and there exists no single metric to measure it accurately. These characteristics can be used to improve the development and maintenance activities of the software. A metric is a quantitative measure of the degree to which a system, system component, or process possesses a given attribute.
Metrics for assessing a software systems maintainability. They refer to a qualitative or quantitative indication of how the process is operating at a given point in time. Well now take a closer look at the various types of the two most important categories of metrics project metrics, and process metrics. Maintenance metrics for the object oriented paradigm, in proceedings of the first international software metrics symposium, ieee, pp.
Software metrics are used to measure the quality of the project. Top 5 software metrics to manage development projects effectively. Software metrics massachusetts institute of technology. Instead, one can measure maintenance process attributes, such as the time required to make a change, which are influenced by software maintainability. It is basically, a subclass of software metrics that mainly emphasizes on quality assets of the software product, process and project. 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. Kan discusses several metrics in each of three groups of software quality metrics. The others are for scheduling, estimation, and productivity. Maintainability prediction software tools offer many benefits. Reliability, availability, and maintainability ram are three system attributes that are of tremendous interest to systems engineers, logisticians, and users. Developer productivity metrics such as active days, assignment scope, efficiency and code churn. Several maintainability issues can be detected using quality metrics. The process consists of finding code fragments that violate structural or semantic properties such as the ones related to coupling and complexity. Metrics for software maintenance software quality metrics.
These metrics offer a highlevel understanding of the standard of software development processes. From the preceding goals one can see that metrics 3. Conclusion more studies should be performed on large industrial software systems to find. Software metrics are measures of the success of a software process. You can specify your items failure rates directly from within relyence maintainability prediction, or you can use the failure rates calculated in your relyence reliability prediction analysis. In this setting, internal attributes used to define these properties, are captured through software metrics, and properties are. Also determine the size, time and number of errors found during testing phase of the sdlc. Two metrics that are taken into account when performing maintainability prediction calculations are repair times and failure rates. Software metrics can also be used control the degradation of a system in order to keep the quality of the maintenance process at a high level. Oo software metrics are divided into two broad categories. First, maintainability prediction software tools provide an organized and systematic framework that allows you to enter basic task repair data, ideally allowing grouping of those tasks, and then assigning the tasks to each of the repairable items in your system. Assessment of maintainability metrics for objectoriented. Within the software development process, there are many metrics that are all related to each.
Maintainability metrics calculations for mttr, mmh. Complexity metrics, business process modeling and analysis, goalquestionmetric 1. In particular, we report the results of a family of experiments that assess relationships between the structural properties, as measured by the metrics, of the process models and their maintainability. It helps to drive the project towards our planned goals without deviation. Consequently, the decisionmaking process about which metrics can be. How to effectively define and measure maintainability. Even if a metric is not a measurement metrics are functions, while measurements are the numbers obtained by the application of metrics, often the two terms are used as synonyms. We can accurately measure some property of software or process. The software metrics study was initiated to propose metrics of the maintainability of the software produced by the mdsf project. In short software quality metrics like productivity metrics focus on the process, the project and the product.
Pdf how to effectively define and measure maintainability. By developing and analyzing a metrics baseline for quality an organization can act to correct those areas of the software process that are the cause of software defects. This metrics describe the project characteristics and execution. Metrics help understand how an analyzed process transforms available inputs into outputs and. This document is a first step towards the construction of a maintainability prediction model. The maintainability index is calculated with certain formulae from linesofcode measures, mccabe measures and halstead. Software process and project metrics linkedin slideshare. Relyence maintainability prediction bestinclass software. Software metrics refers to a broad range of measurements for computer software. Software metrics play the most significant role in building a predictive model of software maintainability. A software metric is a standard of measure of a degree to which a software system or process possesses some property. In software engineering, software maintenance is one of the most expensive and timeconsuming activities. Process metrics are standard measurements that are used to evaluate and benchmark the performance of business processes.
No way to measure property directly or final product does not yet exist for predicting, need a model of relationship of predicted variable with other measurable variables. Maintainability is a multifaceted quality attribute each of the facets must be analyzed to objectively measure it. Closely related concepts in the software engineering domain are evolvability, modifiability, technical debt, and code smells. Describes the characteristics of the product such as size, complexity, design features, performance, and quality level. Reliability, availability, and maintainability sebok. Project and process metrics in software engineering. Metrics, for both process and software, tell us to what extent a desired characteristic is present in our processes or our software systems. Lead time measures the time a team takes to turn customer requests into working software. Agile process metrics such as lead time, cycle time and velocity. He also describes the key metrics used by several major software developers and discusses software metrics data collection. Software process metrics involves measuring of properties of the development process and also known as management metrics. Software metric is a broader concept that incorporates software quality metrics in it, and mainly consists of three types of metrics. Use of metrics to improve software maintainability software maintainability is a difficult factor to quantify. In this context, objectoriented software maintainability oosm has been studied through years, and many researchers have proposed a large number of metrics to measure it.
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