Towards a Catalog Format for Software Metrics

In the past two decades both the industry and the research community have proposed hundreds of metrics to track soft-ware projects, evaluate quality or estimate effort. Unfortu-nately, it is not always clear which metric works best in a particular context. Even worse, for some metrics there is little evidence whether the metric measures the attribute it was designed to measure. In this paper we propose a catalog format for software metrics as a first step towards a consolidated overview of available software metrics. This format is designed to pro-vide an overview of the status of a metric in a glance, while providing enough information to make an informed decision about the use of the metric. We envision this format to be implemented in a (semantic) wiki to ensure that relation