In-process metrics for software testing

Abstract

In-process tracking and measurements play a critical role in software development, particularly for software testing. Although there are many discussions and publications on this subject and numerous proposed metrics, few in-process metrics are presented with sufficient experiences of industry implementation to demonstrate their usefulness. This paper describes several in-process metrics whose usefulness has been proven with ample implementation experiences at the IBM Rochester AS/400® software development laboratory. For each metric, we discuss its purpose, data, interpretation, and use and present a graphic example with real-life data. We contend that most of these metrics, with appropriate tailoring as needed, are applicable to most software projects and should be an integral part of software testing.