Idea of using metrics to control quality and convergence of projects is not new. It is likely that metrics were used even engineers during construction of Egyptian pyramids for quality control and progress tracking—number of installed blocks, consumed resources, etc.
Few thousand years later nowadays software engineers are writing lines of code and their colleagues from the software quality department are searching for software defects—but we still want to use that data to analyze and forecast the project status.
More than 10-year experience of our team shows us, that when considered carefully, metrics could be a very efficient tool for the team on their way to high-quality and predictable releases. In this paper we will cover practice of using metrics within our team:
- What do we measure?
- Why do we measure that?
- How do we measure that?
- How do we use gathered data?
Max Kuzkin
System Architect, Parallels