A Survey of the Relationship between Software Measurements, Software Quality, Productivity, Cost and Process Management
This project is only available to students, faculty, and staff of Portland State University.
Abstract
Software quality has been an important research and practicing field since the early date of the software industry. The concerns range from dissatisfied customers from shrinkwrap PC software to national security issues with software that controls the ICBMs. How to achieve the target software quality before the ship date is constantly debated among the researchers and practitioners alike. However, if it is true that “you can not control what you can not measure,” then is there a relationship between an organization’s desire of software quality and its practices in software measurement? And how about the relationships between software measurement and productivity, cost and software process management. This paper is an examination of these relationships. We have surveyed around 50 software professionals in 30 or so different companies. Our main hypothesis is that there is a correlation between software measurements and software quality. Organizations that have instituted software measurement of any kind are producing better quality products then those do not have any measurement. The paper described the hypothesis and the analysis methodology in details.