An Empirical Study of Process Management and Metrics based on In-process Measurements of a Standardized Requirements Definition Phase

This paper focuses on in-process project measurement in the requirements definition phase based on progress with standardization of this phase. The authors have verified the utility of in-process project measurement in a real mid-scale multi-vendor distributed project. This trial was successful, but limited to a part of the total development process. The project measurement target was limited to later processes such as the coding and testing phases where the output products were easy to acquire. The requirements definition phase where process and product were not standardized was difficult to measure. However, a newly provided governmental process guideline standardizes the process and product for the requirements definition phase, and the authors had an opportunity to measure such a requirements definition effort. This paper presents an empirical study of in-process project measurement in the standardized requirements definition phase, verifies the usefulness of this measurement for project management, and reveals the possibility of creating a new software metrics field using these measurements.