Metrics for Software System Families

Due to the fact that the complexity and development effort of software systems is constantly increasing, software components have to be reused. Software system families are a promising solution to gain a cost reduction by reusing common software assets in different variants of similar products. To support the economic management of this development approach we need software metrics to estimate the effort of building software system families. In general techniques of size measurement and cost estimation for software system families are highly insufficient. Furthermore measurement and estimation approaches do not support a process orientation which characterizes the software of many domains. Therefore this paper describes the Process-Family- Points approach to measure the size and estimate the effort of process focused software system families in multiple domains. Every single step of this new metrics approach will be illustrated from a high level perspective to communicate a conceptional view of this innovative sizing and estimating method