A Perspective on Non Invasive Software Management

Abstract

Measurement in software production is essential for understanding, controlling, and improving the software development process. Past research has emphasized the importance of a disciplined data collection process as a prerequisite for a sound, solid, and useful analysis. This article proposes non-invasive, i.e. automatic measurement techniques to instill a continuous and consistent framework to support software project management and to overcome the drawbacks of manual data collection.

An analysis of developers' tasks using low-level, automatically collected data

“…One approach collects specific information from each monitored software application, [14]. The other approach collects general information regardless of the software applications in use, [25], [11].…”

“…Between the two approaches for collecting data automatically, we choose the second, more general, approach, [25], [11]. This choice is mainly motivated by the fact that the PSP requires a monitoring of the time spent on each task, and thus we need to have data on all interactions between the developer and her computer, regardless of the software she uses.…”

“…Several approaches to automatic collection of data regarding the development process of individual developers and of companies have been proposed, [14], [25], [11]. However, collecting data in an automatic manner changes the nature of the data that is collected, [14].…”

An Architecture for Non-invasive Software Measurement

“…An option is always collect the data ex-post trough questionnaires and qualitative (some times with a level of subjectivity) [20]. However, a non-invasive collection of software metrics is one of the most promising approaches to solve the task [15,4].…”