KPI for Measuring of performance in software development posted in category software development
WinningKPI - software development - KPI for Measuring of performance in software development posted in category software development
These indicators are for measuring of software development process; More details:
we need to identify useful KPIs to measure different dimensions of software development.
Quality Measures:
- Functionality
- Robustness
- Usability
- Efficiency
- Changabily
- Portability
We are interested to know recent best practices to measure / identify software code quality (in SAP software area) based on KPIs and to identify weaknesses in the development processes in order to derive optimization measures.
KPI Units: % (e.g. the usually measure number of defects per line of code appears not to be the appropriate KPI to measure that)
KPI Time Frame: update once a month / quarterly / yearly (short and longer term trends)
This KPI is aligned to the strategic objective to improve development effectively as well as reduce defects.
Thank you for asking such an interesting question. A good starting point for your research might be a presentation that I did in Vienna at "Software Quality Days":
The main idea of the presentation is that common quality metrics (like number of problems per 1000 lines of code) are not working. And I'm sharing with some examples of what might work much better.
Talking about measuring software quality there are lagging and leading metrics. And in the most cases we had to deal with lagging metrics. Talking about leading metrics, you need to look more into the development process that your team employ.
Let me share an example:
You know that your team does a good software, but there are some issues with usability. You can order a usability overview by third-party that will for sure find some problems (this information is relevant to lagging metrics).
Then you do some analysis and you are trying to find the reason of this problems and how you could possibly prevent them. You can build a checklist for your developers that will ensure that some GUI checks are done.
On the next iteration of the development process you can add a simple leading metric - "Usability problems found with a checklist" or "Usability check time." With this two basic indicators you will see that your team is reviewing interface regularly and properly (according to your checklist).
Try applying this idea to your process and soon you will find out there are some good leading metrics specific for your process that tell you that your team is doing good or bad quality job. More important is that you will be able to react on time.
Another important step is to link these metrics to those that are important for your customer. For example, customer's main concern now is functionality and they can manage with an old interface of the software. If this is a case, your GUI-related metrics will have lower priority that your functionality metrics.
I'll be happy to help you with this measurement project.
Sign in to comment Please, register (there is a button 'Become a member of WinningKPI community') in the right sidebar or sign in to leave comments. It is free and more - you will have scores for each comment you post.