Diagnosing Metrics Practices in a Software Organization

Prescription, description, reflection: the shape of the software process improvement field

“…A metrics program in a large Danish company has been reported and reflected upon in a series of contributions. (Iversen, 2000;Frederiksen & Mathiassen, 2002;Frederiksen & Rose, 2003;Iversen & Mathiassen, 2003). Other research has focused on knowledge management and organisational learning (Arent & Nørbjerg, 2000;Kautz & Thaysen, 2001), on SPI in small companies (Kautz, Hansen, & Thaysen, 2000;Kautz, Thaysen, & Vendelø, 2002), on the personal software process (Abrahamsson & Kautz, 2002a,b), on commitment (Abrahamsson, 2001) and on a reflective usage of the IDEAL model (Borjesson & Mathiassen, 2003).…”

Assessing Improvements of Software Metrics Practices

“…The initial activity was to diagnose the current metrics practices (D in Figure 3) involving all relevant stakeholders at KMD (Frederiksen & Mathiassen, 2002;Frederiksen & Rose, 2003). In summary, the diagnosis revealed:…”

“…The adopted diagnostic approach (Checkland, 1981;Andersen, 1990;Checkland & Scholes, 1990;Pedersen, 1996) and our experience with it are reported in (Frederiksen & Mathiassen, 2003).…”

“…Our research is exploratory in nature and based on a longitudinal action research effort (Avison et al, 1999;Kock & Lau, 2001;Mathiassen, 2002;McKay & Marshall, 2001) in KMD, a large Danish software organization providing IT-services for municipal institutions. The initial activity of the research effort was a diagnosis of the existing metrics program (Frederiksen & Mathiassen, 2002;Frederiksen & Rose, 2003). From this diagnosis improvement efforts were subsequently identified and performed.…”