Towards a More Structured Goal Definition and Prioritization Approach for an Effective Measurement Process

Abstract: Measurement processes are vital for any organization as they are used to asses, analyze, monitor and control the processes, products and resources. The measurement programs are used in different ways in different organizations. Most of the measurement programs fail to provide the expected results; therefore it‘s needed to consider the success factors and reasons of failures for the measurement programs. The GQM is the most widely used model for measurement programs having various extensions to overcome its shortcomings in different scenarios. The Goals, Questions and metrics are defined and used in different ways at different levels in the organizations. There is a need of improving the measurement programs and one of the solutions is to provide a framework that can define the goals, questions and measures in a structured way. The prioritization, traceability and re-usability of goals and questions provide the effectiveness in the measurement program. The optimization of the measures and building a measurement repository makes the measurement collection process precise. In this thesis, the results of a systematic review on the current literature on software measurement programs are presented. An assessment of the current state of art on measurement programs, their usability and success factors is done. The study of measurement models, frameworks, tools and standards is done later on to know the different ways of goals, questions definition and measurement collection methods. The systematic review of the research work is done over the period 1997 – 2009. In order to understand and explore the difficulties in application of measurement programs in the industrial settings, interviews are conducted within a CMMI Level 3 company. On the basis of the systematic review analysis results and industrial interviews, a framework for a more effective measurement process is defined and within the framework, a model called ‗Structured Prioritized Goal Question Metrics (SPGQM)‘ is developed. This framework extends the well-known Goal Question Metric paradigm and basically comprises of two models; the Optimum Measures Set Decision (OMSD) model developed within a Master of Science thesis study at the Blekinge Institute of Technology and the SPGQM. This framework defines the process in order to define structured goals and questions with the help of templates and to prioritize them with the help of OMSD model. This framework has been validated in a CMMI Level 3 company. The validation was done by means of conducting a case study.