Goal driven measurement and software process assessment are established technologies, and are used extensively in the software industry to facilitate process improvement. Usually these are activities performed by separate measurement and assessment experts with little mutual co-operation. In the PROFES research project, measurement and assessment have been successfully integrated to save costs and seek synergies. In this paper we describe these integration possibilities and identify their limitations, with a focus on continuous assessment using ISO 15504 as a background reference model for software processes. As a practical example, we present the TOKHEIM experience of establishing and using the continuous assessment approach in extending their measurement programme on the system testing process of the Omega system.

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In ESPRIT project PROFES 1 , measurement according to the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) approach is conducted in industrial software projects at Dräger Medical Technology, Ericsson Finland, and Schlumberger Retail Petroleum Systems. A comparative case study investigates three different ways of applying GQM in product-focused process improvement: (1) Long-term GQM measurement programmes at the application sites to better understand and improve software products and processes. (2) GQMbased construction and validation of product/process dependency models, which describe the process impact on software quality. (3) Cost/Benefit investigation of the PROFES improvement methodology using GQM for (meta-) analysis of improvement programmes. This paper outlines how GQM is applied for these three purposes.

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