Measuring Software Development Productivity - Specification, Design and Prototypical Implementation of a Performance Measurement System

This work has been finished in October 2004.

Companies require software process performance measurement systems in order to reach higher levels of the Capability Maturity Model and gain long term competitive advantages. Current measurement programs suffer from missing, invalid or delayed data, and a lack of metrics standards and analysis functionality. In order to avoid these limitations, the approach utilized in this thesis employs balanced, goal-oriented metrics based on a stakeholder-driven methodology to analyse the software development process. Decision support technology enables the integration and visualization of data gathered from various sources in the organization. This approach was designed and implemented as a generic prototype on the Lotus Notes platform, extending the product range of a Vienna software company by adding a component to a software quality and test suite. The software process of a major customer in the insurance industry was analysed as a sample process.

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