Measures for Software Product Lines

This technical note characterizes the status of measurement associated with the operation of a software product line, suggests a small set of measures to support its management, and provides guidance for those establishing measurement activities within a software product line. It is intended to help managers of software product lines develop a set of base measures for tracking those categories of needs most relevant to their organization's products, projects, and processes. The measures suggested here range from relatively mature to those whose general utility have yet to be validated. Therefore, an organization using this paper needs to assess its ability to generate the measures and the value they are likely to return to the organization. In most cases, an organization may wish to start with a subset of the measures described.