Measuring the Software Size of Sliced V-Model Projects

Abstract

Companies expect higher productivity of their software teams when introducing new software development methods. Productivity is commonly understood as the ratio of output created and resources consumed. Whereas the measurement of the resources consumed is rather straightforward, there are several definitions for counting the output of a software development. Source code-based metrics create a set of valuable figures direct from the heart of the software -the code. However, depending on the chosen process model software developers and testers produce also a fair amount of documentation. Up to now this output remains uncounted leading to an incomplete view on the development output. This article addresses this open point by proposing a novel automated way on software quantity measurement. It extends source code-based metrics, namely the size of code changes which is called churn, by the counting of work items representing the design and test documentation belonging to that churn. We demonstrate the validity of this approach on the sliced V-model process which is an agility extension of the traditional V-model.