Reuse of Measurement Plans Based on Process and Quality Models

• Authors: Christiane M. Differding
• Venue: LSO '01 Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Advances in Learning Software Organizations
• Year: 2001

Measurement is needed for project control, quality assurance, and process improvement activities in software development. Measurement planning is a difficult and time-consuming activity. Therefore, a great interest exists in reusing measurement plans. However, most measurement plans are structured intuitively and are written informally. Therefore, they are difficult to understand and to reuse. The contents of measurement plans strongly depend on the object being measured and the quality focus of measurement. Process models (describing the object) and quality models (describing the quality focus) change from project to project and over time. Therefore, in order to reuse measurement plans from one project to the next, relationships between measurement plans and process and quality models are needed. These relationships can be used to identify and adapt existing measurement plans to varying process and quality models. This paper presents a formal conceptual model of measurement plans including relationships to process and quality models and a development process for such measurement plans. This model and process build a sound basis for reuse of measurement plans. To further support reuse, a conceptual model for components of measurement plan elements is sketched. Components can be reused to build new measurement plans. A rudimentary reuse process is proposed that starts from a similarity analysis of the (reused and new) underlying process model and quality models.