Industrial software metrics top ten list

Unlike other commodities, the more software you build, the more expensive it is per source line. However, given metric 1, walkthroughs are not catching the errors that matter and certainly are not catching them early enough in the life cycle.

All defects are not created equal. In general, walkthroughs and other forms of human inspection are good at catching surface problems and style issues. If you are using ad hoc design notations, human review may be your primary quality assurance mechanism, but it is not good at uncovering second-, third-, and Nth-order issues such as resource contention, performance bottlenecks, control conflicts, and so on. Furthermore, few humans are good at reviewing even first-order semantic issues in a code segment.

How many programmers get their code to compile the first time? I have expanded this metric into a more specific interpretation for software. The following fundamental postulates underlie the rationale for a modern software management process framework:. These relationships provide some good benchmarks for evaluating process improvements and technology improvements. They represent rough rules of thumb that objectively characterize the performance of the conventional software management process and conventional technologies.

In later chapters, I return to many of these measures to rationalize a new approach, defend an old approach, and quantify process or technology improvements. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Background Citations. Methods Citations. Results Citations. Citation Type. Is this process effective? Estimate how frequently and concisely are you delivering new units; assess the effects of new practices or changes, and set targets for process and product improvements.

How can we improve further? You can measure the time it takes to conduct each major development activity and estimate its effect on quality and productivity. Afterwards, you can compare the costs and benefits of certain practices to determine which is worth the cost.

Or you can benchmark two different practices to choose a better approach: for example, ask two teams to test different DevOps practices and determine which increases code quality.

Productivity metrics for software development clarify performance expectations. Your team remains engaged as they know exactly what is expected of them at work. Metrics communicate your expectations and show you how to measure developer productivity without any bias.

Productivity metrics for software development help you identify what factors hinder the effectiveness of your team and eliminate those, which would ultimately lead to a happier, high-performing team. The combination of the previous factors contributes to simplified workflows and consistent discovery of new insights that can improve existing product life cycles.

You can spot the common bottlenecks, take immediate action and deploy better code, faster, at a lesser cost. The final question is how to measure software productivity? Your answer: quantify individual input and pay attention to agile software metrics that really matter. You can train your teams to perform their best work fast and effectively, but if your end product is software that works, but does not create any business value, you are pursuing the wrong metrics.

To understand how to measure productivity in software development, you will need to track both business and agile metrics. Make business success your ultimate metric of productivity measuring. Is your customer happy? Do you deliver on time? How quickly your business results improve? To obtain data-backed answers to these questions you will need to include specific success criteria for each product requirement e.

Sprint Burndown is one of the key metrics for agile scrum. A burndown report communicates the complexion of work throughout the sprint based on story points. The goal of the team is to consistently deliver all work, according to the forecast. It can be measured in story points or hours, and you can use this metric for estimation and planning.

You should also pay attention to the volatility of your velocity. If you score high volatility consistently, it means that some process is now working, and you need to investigate that. Each team has a specific estimation culture and can have a different interpretation of story points that you should account for. Throughput indicates the total value-added work output by the team. It is typically represented by the units of work tickets the team has completed within a set period of time.

You should align your throughput metric with your current business goals. Task management, team collaboration, document management, and email integrations are the common features in simple project management software. A comprehensive project management software has more features that cover core project management functions such as scheduling, resource management, and financial management on top of more advanced project management features.

A PM suite will have a higher cost but also deliver accurate estimates, dependencies control, unlimited projects within a single instance, real-time progress tracking, and comprehensive reports that justifies the price of the solution. These tools also require more oversight and time to be more effective in managing projects. Larger organizations and teams prefer integrated project management software, especially for more complex projects.

Free project management software is available for home use, for very small teams of people, and as a fully-featured free and open source system. Many of these tools are offered as a free tier by project management vendors that also provide various levels of paid service. Free tiers may have more limited features, may be restricted to a few users, or may come with limited personalized support.

However, many small teams and those just testing out a new tool may find these options useful to help in their decision-making process. Open source is a valuable option for large teams looking for a free project management software. These tools provide all of the same features you may find in a subscription or on-premise tool and many of these tools are highly customizable for different project types. However, access to support, implementation help, and custom changes will need to be managed by an in-house or third party development team.

Not every industry is best-served with a standard project management system, and so industry-specific project management tools were developed to reduce the amount of customization a company will need upon implementation. Construction, software development, financial services, healthcare, and law all have features and customizations that make them better suited to industry work.

In industry-specific tools, you can expect to find collaboration tools, expense tracking, portfolio management, contractor management, resource management, and more. These tools may also help you manage a creative team, a remote team, or a specialized project within your larger portfolio.

The right features for your team will depend on the size of your team, the complexity of the projects you run, and the use case you will use the software in.

This feature allows team members to:. Task management is essential in a project management software. The best project management tools offer visual task management in Kanban boards, Gantt charts, waterfall dependencies, and burndown charts.

These tools give a visual representation of project progress that is often easier to understand than a set of lists or items in a spreadsheet. Collaboration tools help solve complex projects. These features ensure that everyone who can see a task or portion of the project can comment, add assets to, and notate changes in the same interface where all of the project information is stored.

Visual task representations, messaging, task descriptions, notation features, asset upload capabilities, tags, email integrations, calendar tools, and more are considered collaboration features. Creative teams may run several smaller projects concurrently, and can make use of Gantt charts and cross-team approvals to keep work flowing to reach deadlines.

Large teams should use collaboration tools to keep the project up to date, alert team members to major and minor changes, and centralize assets.

Software support documentation helps new and existing team members troubleshoot issues within the software and learn to use the tools quickly. Documentation and support tools that shorten the learning curve include:.

Some tools offer email and phone support only to paying subscribers, while others offer only online documentation or customer forums for any plan. If you think your team will need personalized support, look for tools with good support ratings. This feature significantly increases productivity as the user can manage tasks and updates from their inbox without logging in to the tool.

Individual members should also be able to set limits on the frequency and types of email notifications they receive. A good project management app provides a space for teams to store and manage files directly in the tool or by using an integrated third-party solution.

Document management features that are indispensable in a PM software are:. An online PM app also provides cloud storage space or integrates with a third-party service that provides it. Basecamp is a project management tool that is built around a centralized project document and also provides some asset upload capabilities. Also read: Basecamp vs. Microsoft Comparison.