Defining a catalog of indicators to support process performance analysis

Abstract

AbstractTo achieve high‐level maturity in software process improvement, organizations must change the project management focus from the empirical assessment of process performance to quantitative management of the software process based on performance measures and statistical techniques. To this purpose, managers need to work with years of measurement data to establish control limits and conduct performance analyses. In this context, some difficulties are encountered: Which measures should be used, considering that early definition is important? Which statistical technique is more adequate in each case? How should we work with the data? We found more than 500 different measures in the literature applicable to software process performance and a number of different statistical techniques to analyze and choose from. This article aims at defining a catalog of indicators with their related measures in answer to the above questions, in a way that can help managers perform process performance analysis of the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development (CMMI‐DEV) engineering processes. This article presents how we define and use this catalog and the complete specification of two indicators. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.