A new framework of measuring software development processes

Abstract

The paper proposes a new framework of measuring software development processes and validates its effectiveness by examples. The key idea of this proposed framework is that all activities on measurement could be explained by a mathematical model of the process to be measured. In this framework, a Petri net model is used as the model of the process, since it is one of the most powerful models to represent concurrent processes such as software development processes. The proposed framework consists of four steps: (1) process modeling; (2) metric definition; (3) process and metric implementation; and (4) process and metric execution. The authors show that the proposed framework can make it possible to measure a software development process in a systematic way from experimental evaluations in an academic environment. The proposed framework has the potential to produce three future technologies of software measurement.<>