A Proposal and Empirical Validation of Metrics to Evaluate the Maintainability of Software Process Models

Software measurement is essential for understanding, defining, managing and controlling the software development and maintenance processes and it is not possible to characterize the various aspects of development in a quantitative way without having a deep understanding of software development activities and their relationships The current competitive marketplace calls for the continuous improvement of processes and as consequence companies have to change their processes in order to adapt to these new emerging needs. It implies the continuous change of their software process models and therefore, it is fundamental to facilitate the evolution of these models by evaluating its easiness of maintenance (maintainability). In this paper we introduce a set of metrics for software process models and discuss how these can be used as maintainability indicators. In particular, we report the results of a family of experiments that assess relationships between the structural properties, as measured by the metrics, of the process models and their maintainability. As a result a set of useful metrics to evaluate the software process models maintainability, have been obtained