A Bipartite Empirically Oriented Metrics Process for Agile Software Development

摘要

An agile process has two primary actors. One is the development team, which commits to develop software for a specific small set of requirements in a limited amount of time, and then develops and tests this software. The other is overall project management, which hands off the requirements and appropriate components to the teams and interfaces with stakeholders such as customers. In a similar vein, metrics for an agile process should have two parts: one for the development team and one for project management. This article outlines metrics for an agile process being used at Brooks Automation. The process uses lightweight metrics at the development team level, where the focus is on developing working code, and more heavyweight metrics at the project management level, white the focus is on delivering a quality release to the customer. The authors describe the process and carry out a goal-question-metric (GQM) analysis to determine the goals and questions for such a process. They then examine the specific metrics used in the process, identifying them as either team-related or project-management-related; compare their scope to that shown by the GQM analysis; and identify issues in the existing metrics. Approaches to rectify those issues are then described.