Production and Maintenance of Goal-Oriented Software Measurement Models

Abstract

Production and maintenance of measurement models are crucial in the context of an advanced software development organization. The paper suggests a goal-oriented measurement model life cycle that, starting out from the high-level organizational goals, drives software organizations towards a structured process to deal with measurement models. The life cycle results into an integrated component of the management activities pointed to generate, refine, and fulfill the organizational goals, whereas the final measurement models become items of a purpose fitting measurement plan. For each phase of the life cycle, the main activities, with their inputs and outputs, are identified and, moreover, some driving templates are defined. The paper analyzes their interactions with the other software production and management-related tasks and proposes a possible allocation within an Experience Factory-based software organization.

Metrics for data warehouse conceptual models understandability

“…3 presents the method we apply for obtaining valid and useful metrics. This method is based on the methods proposed by [12] and the MMLC (Measure Model Life Cycle [13]). In this figure continuous lines show metric flow and dotted lines show information flow.…”

Building measure-based prediction models for UML class diagram maintainability

“…The proposal of measures is of no value if their practical use is not shown empirically (Basili et al 1999;Kitchenham et al 1995;Schneidewind 1992;Cantone and Donzelli 2000). Hence, our main motivation was to investigate, through experimentation, whether the measures we proposed for UML class diagram structural complexity and size could be good predictors of two class diagram characteristics that are related to maintainability: understandability and modifiability.…”

“…Several reviews of the most up-to-date empirical studies related to OO measures (Basili et al 1999;Kitchenham et al 1995;Schneidewind 1992;Cantone and Donzelli 2000;Briand and Wüst 2002) have shown that the dependent variables that are investigated most frequently are fault-proneness (probability of fault detection), the number of faults or changes in a class, the effort of various development activities, and expert opinion about the psychological complexity of a class.…”

Handling the knowledge acquired during the requirements engineering process

“…The Soft Goal Modelling aims at producing the operational definitions of the soft goals that emerged during the organisational modelling, sufficient to capture and make explicit the semantics that are usually assigned implicitly by the involved agents [8,9,10] and to highlight the system quality issues from the start. A soft goal is refined in terms of subordinate soft goals, hard goals, tasks and constraints.…”