Software metrics are measures used to quantify various aspects of your software. These aspects can range from the cost, quality, and efficiency of the development team.
Software metrics enable project stakeholders to track the productivity of the developers, measure software performance, and plan for a software project.
These are among the many benefits of tracking software metrics. Follow through this article to learn how you can use software metrics.
How Do You Determine a Metric to Use?
First, you need to know how measurement works. Measurement is the process of assigning value to an attribute of an entity.
An entity is any distinct identifiable object, while an attribute is a property that this object has. You can have an entity like system availability, with attributes like system uptime and downtime.
A metric defines a generally accepted scale for measuring an attribute. For example, the metric for measuring system uptime or downtime can be seconds.
Now would be a good time to mention that software metrics are subjective. There are no clearly defined metrics that you must adhere to. Though, there are widely known metrics to help you measure common aspects of your software.
Examples of Software Metrics
Lines of Code (LOC)
This is a common metric that can be used to measure the size of a software project. Developers normally count kilo lines of code, hence KLOC is the commonly used unit.
Measuring software size using lines of code isn't as basic as it seems. This is because there are two differing standards for counting lines of code.
The first method defines a line of code as any code written until a return character is encountered. On the other hand, some developers define each logical statement as a line of code.
Therefore, this causes conflicts in the interpretation of the metric: "lines of code." Ideally, such a metric should be used after understanding how an organization internally interprets LOC.
Number of Defects
This is a metric that can be used to measure the quality of code produced by your developers. You can keep track of the errors per KLOC so as to know how efficiently your team is working.
Lead Time
You may need to know how long your developers take to come up with their ideas or to solve problems. A good way to do so is to keep track of the lead time. This can help you gauge the quality and experience of your development team.
Sustainable Software Development
Software metrics enable you to know if your project goals are being met. They are simply there to help you stay on course and help you realize where you can improve in the future.
Make sure that you follow all the software development steps before you even begin to measure if you're going about the development in the right way.