Tool support in practice is an important success factor for a sustained metrics program. A number of commercial metric tools claim to support the collection and analysis of software metrics.

However, these tools vary widely in their ability to seamlessly integrate with the many additional software components and tools required in a typical software development process. While the metric tools often provide powerful data analysis features, data input and output is usually restricted to a few formats and often requires manual user interaction.

This paper points out key aspects of tool automation for a metric program — like standard interfaces and automation support— and evaluates several prominent commercial software metric tools with regard to these criteria.

Main results are: tight integration of metric tools in heterogeneous development environments is still not a standard practice/feature and can thus be a substantial cost burden in a metric program due to restriced interfacing and automation capabilities.