Practitioner-based measurement: a collaborative approach

• Authors: S. T. Parkinson;R. M. Hierons;M. Lycett;M. Norman
• Venue: Communications of the ACM
• Year: 2010

Introduction The established philosophy within the software development industry is that an organization implementing a program to improve software quality can expect to recoup the cost of the implementation many times over through the reduced cost associated with improvements in quality. Measurement initiatives are perceived to provide a key contribution to quality improvement as evidenced by the focus of early measurement based initiatives and the place of measurement in the higher echelons of process initiatives. In general, organizations pursue measurement initiatives from a perspective that, without measurement, control is not possible. While organizations recognize that there are potential benefits to measuring their processes and products, however, they typically find it difficult to structure ad-hoc measures into a formal program -- a situation that is compounded by the significant cost of implementing such programs. Although these problems have led to some organizations moving away from measurement programs, many companies still use measurement programs as illustrated by the continued interest in, for example, the Capability Maturity Model. Given the appetite and potential returns on investment of measurement frameworks and initiatives, ways of successfully implementing them are important. With that importance in mind, this work evaluates the implementation of such a measurement framework in a major Insurance organization. A hybrid model -- practitioner-based -- was devised to incorporate the best aspects of current approaches and mitigate identified shortcomings. In order to continually improve software quality, research was conducted to understand the critical success factors in implementing software measurement programs, develop a measurement framework to address the critical success factors, implement a pilot program based on that framework, and reflect on the outcomes of implementation for future practice. We examine existing measurement frameworks in order to assess the critical success factors and the relative strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches in relation to those factors and describe the model that results from the outcomes of the analysis of strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches. Later, we describe the implementation of a pilot of the model in an established IT department and evaluate the success of the pilot and the implications for the state-of-the-art.