High Maturity Organizational Characteristics

Metrics are beneficial to an organization that supports a product from inception through product retirement and disposal. Quality metrics have a critical role in this type of environment because they span both the development and operations and maintenance phases of the software life cycle, and there is a relationship between the internal quality metrics collected during development and the external quality metrics collected once the product is deployed. The key finding is that internal metrics can be collected early in the software development phase to predict the support required during the operations and maintenance phase; likewise, external metrics can be collected to drive software development process improvements. Finally, analyzing the relationships between the two can drive overall process improvements for the entire software lifecycle. Improving Software through Metrics while Providing Cradle to Grave Support Role of Metrics It is important to understand the role metrics play in the overall software lifecycle. First, the metrics of concern in this paper are quality attributes because maintenance efforts are highly dependent on the overall quality of the software [3]. In addition, quality attributes span both pre-delivery and post-delivery phases of the lifecycle and are therefore specifically relevant when a single organization supports the software over the entire lifecycle. Second, quality attributes are categorized as either internal or external [4]. “Internal quality attributes are those that can be directly measured purely on the basis of product features such as size, length, or complexity” [5]. External metrics are measurements that are dependent on how the software interacts with its environment and can therefore only be collected after the product has been deployed and operated during the maintenance and operations phase of the software lifecycle [5]. The remainder of this discussion involves the relationship between internal and external metrics.