Measurement and Analysis in Agile Software Development

One of the basic aims of Software Engineering is: The transformation of the software creation process from an artistic, undisciplined and few understandable to controlled, quantified and previsible way.

“Software Metrics” is a topic discussed more than 30 years in software engineering. However is not verified the use, in practice, in most of software projects.

Without the correct information, we are just one more with an opinion about something. We can’t provide the correct data for our customers, partners or audience.

To support the management with a correct insight about the software development process, using this data to proceed and make decisions based on the real state of the project and team, improving what need to be improved

A good project management predicts the possibility of knowing the future behavior of a software process before it happens; for this, it’s needed to have the correct and trusted data. This is why it’s so important to measure things in project management world.

The main goal is to help to make decisions for the project, the process, the organization, the team and everyone involved in the environment itself.

It is a process, we use some numbers or symbols assigned to entities from the real world, this is to help us in mapping each entity with rules, clear rules.

All of them are been around the concepts of Software Process, Products, and Services.

This model defines an Information Product to satisfy the needs of information. This product is built by a measurable construction from attributes that represents entities.

It could be very formal and demands much more time that we normally want to spend, so there are other tools and techniques for this, the Quantitative Management can be made using one or more of this:

Pareto Diagram

Scatter Diagram

Cause and Effect Diagram

Run Chart

Burndown (Well know for those who use Scrum Methodology)

The purpose of measurements is to facilitate the communication of data visually so that they can be more easily understood. Measurements are great. But if no one can interpret them, they are: useless!

There are some difficulties and the measurement process could be done wrong, to prevent some failures there are some things that we can do:

And you, are using some of those to measure the work done? Are achieving some results by using it? Let me know in the comments.

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