Developing Product Line Measures Workshop

Challenges:
Implementing software measures is often a difficult undertaking even for a single software project. Implementing measures for a software product line is even more challenging due to the additional perspectives and goals, as well as the need to coordinate across multiple projects.

Is your software product line producing the results you expected?
Are your current measures providing you the information needed to manage your software product lines?
Do your engineers wonder why various data items are collected and how they are being used?

Overview:
The Developing Product Line Measures Workshop is based on our Implement Goal-Driven Software Measurement course. The workshop utilizes the same 10-step process as the course to guide participants to define meaningful measures aligned with their software product line goals.

Benefits:
The workshop produces a set of measures with operational definitions and an action plan for obtaining them within the context of the processes in the software product line.

Who Would Benefit:
Software product line managers, software product development managers, software core asset development managers, and Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) members.

Example Use:
During a recent initial three-day working session, the SEI and a customer team identified a variety of potential measures relevant to the organization in general and specific to the software product line. This has allowed the software product line manager to focus specifically on the measures of relevance to the product line while knowing what other measures will be collected and available as a matter of routine.

Description:
The 10-steps in the workshop process include:

The Goal-Driven Software Measurement process consists of the following steps:

Identifying Goals - leads the participants from high-level goal statements to actionable measurement goals.
	1.	identify your business goals
	2.	identify what you want to know or learn
	3.	identify your subgoals
	4.	identify the entities and attributes related to your subgoals
	5.	formalize your measurement goals

Defining Indicators - leads the participants to specify the charts, tables, or measures that will address the software product line manager's goals.
	6.	identify quantifiable questions and the related indicators that you will use to help you achieve your measurement goals
	7.	identify the data elements that you will collect to construct the indicators that help answer your questions
	8.	define the measures to be used, and make these definitions operational

Creating an Action Plan - develops a plan to implement the defined indicators after the completion of the workshop.
	9.	identify the actions that you will take to implement the measures
	10.	prepare a plan for implementing the measures

Outputs of the Developing Software Product Line Measures Workshop include:

A list of software product line goals
A measurement goal statement for each software product line goal
Draft Measurement Definitions based on a standard template
An action plan for implementing the identified measures

Availability:
SEI staff will work with product line management team. The methodology is described in Goal-Driven Software Measurement - A Guidebook (CMU/SEI-96-HB-002).

Additional Information:

Technical details: Wolfhart Goethert
Arranging Developing Software Product Line Measures services: Linda Northrop

Keywords:
Software measurement, project management, GQM, software product lines, product line measures.