Abstract. Most of the software organizations face difficulties in choosing the measures to collect since there is no universal set of measures for all types of organizations and projects. Experience shows that measurement can be more successful if the measures are collected based on the goals of the organization or the project which it will serve. However, one of the major constraints for the organizations is the associated cost for the resources needed when collecting the measures. Therefore, based on their goals, the software organizations require collecting not only as few measures from a large number of possible measures as possible but an optimum set of measures as well. In this paper, we propose a model, called 'Optimum Measures Set Decision (OMSD) Model', which is an extension of the well-known Goal Question Metric (GQM) paradigm using a heuristics approach. We performed a survey by distributing a structured questionnaire to a number of people from the industry in order evaluate and get feedback on these factors. We evaluated the rules of the model by means of some sample cases we created. In this paper, we discuss OMSD as well as the empirical studies we conducted in order to develop it.