A Practical Metrics and Measurements Guide for Today's Software Project Manager

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5. IEEE 1061-Based Approaches

Software Quality Engineering (SQE) has been defined as the formal management of quality throughout the software product lifecycle. To best support this requirement, any supporting methodology must be able to enable both the definition of the quality requirements, reporting, evaluation, and subsequent improvement. A quality model as viewed from this perspective should facilitate the specification of quality requirements and the assessment of software quality.

The details for the approaches provided in this section are provided in IEEE Standard 1061, IEEE Standard for a Software Quality Metrics Methodology. IEEE Std 1061 was originally developed in 1993, revised in 1998, and subsequently reaffirmed in 2004.[137] IEEE Std 1061 is presented to users as a process standard and not a standard recommending specific metrics for employment.

This standard presents three frameworks that support software metrics and measurement activities. These are presented here in the order in which they appear in the standard: the Software Quality Metrics Methodology, the Goal, Question, Metric (GQM) Paradigm, and Practical Software Measurement (PSM).

5.1 The Software Quality Metrics Methodology

The software quality metrics methodology offers organizations a five step approach in support of “establishing the quality requirements and identifying, implementing, analyzing, and validating the process and product software quality metrics for a software system.”[49] The five steps are described in Table 5-1.

1) Establish	a) Identify list of possible quality requirements
	b) Determine list of quality requirements
	c) Assign a direct metric to each quality requirement
2) Identify	a) Apply the software quality metrics framework
	b) Perform a cost-benefit analysis
	c) Gain commitment to the metrics
3) Implement	a) Define the data collection procedures
	b) Prototype the measurement process
	c) Collect the data and compute the metric values
4) Analyze	a) Interpret the results
	b) Identify software quality
	c) Make software quality predictions
	d) Ensure compliance with requirements
5) Validate	a) Apply the validation methodology
	b) Apply the validity criteria
	c) Apply the validation procedures
	d) Document results

Table 5-1. Software Quality Metrics Methodology –5 Step Summary.

The software quality metrics framework presented by IEEE Std 1061 is hierarchical and is designed to be flexible. It begins with the establishment of quality requirements, which are used to describe the quality of software (or a system). These requirements are assigned quality attributes. Each of these quality attributes are then subsequently assigned quality factors or subfactors as required, decomposing into meaningful measures. For example, as described in this standard, a metric associated with the quality factor reliability could be mean time to failure (MTTF).[49]

IEEE Std 1061 defines this as a top to bottom and bottom to top approach to quality:

“From a top down perspective the [quality] framework facilitates:

Establishment of quality requirements factors, by customers and managers early in a system’s lifecycle;
Communication of the established quality factors, in terms of quality sub-factors, to the technical personnel;
Identification of metrics that are related to the established quality factors and quality sub-factors.

From a bottom up perspective the [quality] framework enables the managerial and technical personnel to obtain feedback by:

Evaluating the software products and processes at the metrics level;
Analyzing the metric values to estimate and assess the quality factors.”[49]

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