Title: Industrial experiences with Goal/Question/Metric measurement
Speaker: Rini van Solingen, The Netherlands

Abstract
Although the benefits of measurement for industrial software projects are
largely adopted in both academia and industry, its application in industrial
projects is still dissappointing. Several reasons are often mentioned for
this, which are largely solved within the GQM (Goal/Question/Metric)
approach. GQM centres around specifying metrics towards explicitly stated
purposes for specific industrial projects. No company wide measurements are
promoted, but instead specific measurements are taken for specific goals of
projects. Furthermore, the analysis of the measurements is the main
objective of the approach and is carried out only by those people that
collected the measurements: the software developers themselves.

Experiences with GQM are increasing in industry and are positive. Especially
the goal-driven nature of business is highly supported by the goal-oriented
character of GQM. The learning approach established in the software teams is
one of the other main benefits. Software developers are positive about the
different approach towards measurement, established by GQM.

This presentation presents the basics of GQM software measurement and
provides many examples from real industrial projects with GQM. Not the
metrics are most important, but especially the conclusions from the data by
the teams and the actions taken based on their analysis. Those experiences
have been recently published in the McGrawHill book: The
Goal/Question/Metric method: A practical guide for quality improvement of
software development, of which the speaker is the first author. For more
information see: Http://www.gqm.nl/
 

Rini van Solingen holds a M.Sc. in computer science from Delft University of
Technology The Netherlands and has finished his Ph.D. thesis on Product
Focused Software Process Improvement, which he will defend early 2000. He
has worked the last five years as a senior software quality engineer for
Schlumberger RPS and Tokheim and was workpackage manager of the industrial
applications in the recently finalised PROFES project. He has published more
than 40 papers in international journals and conferences. On January 1, 2000
he starts in his new job as head of the Quality and Process Engineering
department in the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering
in Kaiserslautern, Germany.