Role of software metrics in software engineering and requirements analysis

Abstract

The current software engineering practices observed in the local software industry generally lacks the software metrics planning part. The specific planning required to improve the software practices, to gauge the productivity of the individuals, and productivity at different phases of software development life cycle (SDLC), is generally missing. These organizations do not have any planning to gauge and control the business development issues and improve their productivities. During development phase, most of these software houses do collect data about different aspects of the project like project planning, requirement specification, testing, and bugs found. However, these organizations, generally, do not understand the importance of such data elements, how to maintain the data, how to built measurements plan, and most importantly how to use this data to improve their processes and productivity. In fact most of the time, the available data gets destroyed and hence never used. The current talk will discuss the need and importance of software metrics, the role of metrics in different phases of SDLC, and particularly the requirement phase. The requirement elicitation is considered as the most important aspect of software development, and if not handled properly, may cause severe productivity and quality issues. The talk will elaborate different metrics that may be used in requirement elicitation process and hence may help improve the requirement document resulting in improved productivity in the overall software development. © 2005 IEEE.