Achieving software quality by GQM measurement

Software development is a discipline with specific management difficulties. Collecting relevant data during development is a way to overcome these difficulties. Such data collection for sqftware development is termed "Software Measurement". Software measurement is a powerful aid to quality improvement of products and processes. A well-known and popular software measurement approach is the Goal/Question/Metric approach (GQM). This chapter presents available techniques for GQM measurement and a research road map to enhance GQM into a mature measurement approach. The main conclusion is that GQM promises to become the international standard for software measurement. However, the emphasis of the method must be focused on the interpretation process of measurement data and tools must become available that support this interpretation process. Organisations should start to recognise that improved understanding by developers is the only way to continuous improvement. Only bottom-up approaches, such as GQM, provide this understanding. Bottom-up improvement must be applied in practice. It is recommended to apply top-down improvement approaches, such as the Capability Maturity Model, in parallel with software measurement