Performing on Metrics

Software Metrics: A Guide to Planning, Analysis, and Application
C. Ravindranath Pandian
Auerbach
2003
ISBN 0-8493-1661-8
286 pp., US $69.95.

Managing software projects is no ordinary job. It requires implicit understanding of a management process’s performance parameters because a software project involves both resources (such as money, technology, and manpower) and important issues related to how it aligns with the process it’s addressing. Developing metrics for tracking and analyzing measured parameters is probably a project manager’s most difficult task. Software Metrics: A Guide to Planning, Analysis, and Application can definitely help managers with it.

The book provides details for understanding metrics and traceability in software project measurement. It also discusses linking organizational metrics at the macro level. Though the book’s major strength is in compiling various multivariate data analysis tools and techniques, it presumes that the reader is prepared for the base data on which it makes its analyses. Describing how to apply the tools and techniques through cases from the author’s different organizational experiences would have been helpful.

CMM (Capability Maturity Model), IDEAL, ISO (International Organization for Standardization), and Six-Sigma generate specific metrics for quality measurement. Software development organizations with large, specific, high-volume, and high-turnover projects have put these metrics to rigorous use for quality assurance. However, software engineering deals with many other popular process and product models, such as the system development life cycle—including Waterfall, rapid application development (RAD), and so forth. Many organizations with different magnitudes of personnel, technology, tools, and cost use these models, so the models must be strengthened with metrics. Therefore, author C. Ravindranath Pandian could have strengthened the book by discussing these models and providing metrics for all project types. In addition, the book would be more complete if it discussed issues related to developing user metrics during project management.

While many books are available on multivariate data analysis (which is this book’s theme), Software Metrics: A Guide to Planning, Analysis, and Application would be a good supplement to a software project manager’s bookshelf. It displays many graphics for analyzing software centric data, measurement criteria, and metrics. The sequential approach to metric data analyses of time, frequency, and relationship domains is helpful for monitoring and analyzing software projects at hand.

Readers might find the book useful if they’re already skilled at software engineering and have some software development project involvement. But this book would make a better read if supplemented by V.R. Vasili’s Goal Question Metric (GQM) principles.

Harekrishna Misra is an associate professor at the Institute of Rural Management in Gujarat, India. Contact him at hkmishra@ieee.org.