Evaluation & Validation Of Work Products In Unified Software Development Process

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A work product is a general abstraction that represents something obtained from the software development process. A work product may have many work product kinds. For instance, we might want to have a series of work product kinds that keeps up a correspondence to the overall intent of work products, such as specification, plan, or model. There are three types of work products- Artifact, Outcome and Deliverable. An artifact is formal work product that is produced, modified, or used by a task, defines an area of responsibility and is subject to version control. Outcome primarily describes intangible work products that are a result or state. An Outcome can also be used to represent an informal work product. A deliverable is an output from a process that has a value, material or otherwise, to a customer or other stakeholder. In this paper we have investigated the software metrics to evaluate different work products in analysis & design. Tasks have input and output work products. Roles use work products to perform tasks, and produce other work products in the course of performing tasks. Work products are the responsibility of a single role, making responsibility easy to identify and understand, and promoting the idea that every piece of information produced in the process requires the appropriate set of skills. Even though one role may own the work product, other roles will use the work product, perhaps even updating it if the role has been given permission to do so. We have suggested some metrics pertaining to the input and output artifacts. The metrics that we developed are for analysis and design process, software architecture document artifact, and design model artifact. Also we investigated how to quantify the artifact checklist items and make a decision about the quality for different attributes of the process and artifacts, and finally deciding upon the overall quality.