Emperor’s new clothes: Transparency through metrication in customer-supplier relationships

Abstract

Space projects, and development of software embedded in these systems, are complex, sometimes costing hundreds of millions of Euros and involving several tiers of suppliers. An important means of improving mutual understanding is to increase transparency of the development status between customers and suppliers. We raise the problem of transparency in complex projects to the reader’s attention, and, relying on results of a small survey of practitioners, propose to use ECSS software metrics/KPIs as a mitigation. We present our metrication infrastructure, and describe issues to be considered when implementing an early metrication programme in a real-world, industry space project.