Improvement in Key Project Performance Indicators through deployment of a Comprehensive Test Metrics Advisory Tool

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Mandeep Walia
Anu Gupta

Abstract

A wide variety of software metrics focusing on various levels of abstraction and attributes have been recommended by the software research community. Several organizations have implemented comprehensive metrics programs to strengthen management decision making and enable continuous improvement of their software engineering processes. In spite of the enormous efforts made to bring about advancements in the field, industry’s adoption of various metrics is still at a basic level and has not changed much over past 20+ years. Moreover, the project manager community still struggles to identify the right set of metrics pertaining to their specific needs and looking for guidelines on how to make the right usage of selected metric sets.

There was a dedicated research effort made by the authors over past 3+ years to bring together various attributes of interest in software testing life cycle phases along the dimensions of effectiveness and efficiency with a special focus on the associations amongst these attributes. This research effort produced a software test metrics advisory tool, which project managers for software testing projects can depend upon as an advisory aid while making selection, usage and interpretation of various attributes and associated metric sets apt for their needs.

This paper provides a view of the improvement which was observed in key performance indicators of 30 software testing projects in an IT organization when this test metrics advisory tool was closely deployed across all these projects. The paper also provides a view of the statistical validation exercise that was conducted to prove that the deployment of the tool actually resulted in improvements in all the identified indicators.

It is highly expected that the research work undertaken by authors will contribute significantly towards filling up a crucial gap in the field of software test measures and metrics. Project managers for software testing projects will be able to effectively leverage the devised advisory tool for seeking answers to various questions running in their minds related to software measurement.

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