A Metrics Tracking Program for Promoting High-Quality Software Development

There has been substantial focus on software metrics over the last few decades. However, many activities within software engineering are often qualitative and are not consonant with automated approaches. Consequently, there are few tools to measure software development quality or to assess teamwork contribution. This paper uses ideas from the Goal-Questions-Metrics (GQM) paradigm to propose a set of metrics to track product and process quality throughout the software development process. The proposed metrics program consists of a set of quality metrics and associated standards that will encourage software development teams to produce high-quality products. We also propose a framework for a tool that implements the metrics tracking program and demonstrate its utility by developing an Eclipse plugin based on the proposed quality metrics.