A practical experiment in teaching software engineering metrics

Software metrics are acknowledged by both software engineering researchers and educators as being of great importance in improving the software development process. Unfortunately, the current practice in industry is to largely ignore metrics and work at an instinctive level. The best way of improving industry practice seems to be to indoctrinate current software engineering students into accepting metrics as a normal part of the software engineering process. An experiment conducted at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is presented that aims at introducing productivity measurement as an integral part of student software engineering project and assignment work.