Evaluation of a metrics framework for product and process integrity

Although nearly everyone agrees that the collection and analysis of metrics is highly beneficial to software development and maintenance organizations, this process remains difficult for many of those organizations. The purpose of this paper is to describe a practical set of metrics that are focused on customer satisfaction and that are easily understood by both customer and developer organizations. These metrics are evaluated against a process improvement framework that emphasizes business value and compared to criteria for appropriate metrics that have been established by leaders in the software process improvement field. The goals and concepts related to these metrics are in compliance with the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM(R)) for software.