Chapter 7: A Lifecycle for Metrication

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OVERVIEW

Key Points:

A project based lifecycle for developing and implementing a measurement program

A brief overview of the constituent parts of that lifecycle

This chapter introduces the second section of the book. This section discusses the development and implementation of Software Metrics initiatives or programs within business organizations. The intention is to provide a route map that will take a practitioner from the initiation of such a program all the way through to its first stage of implementation. At that point it is a question of expansion and further implementation and all the points that will have been discussed by then apply for the future.

The framework upon which this section is built is a lifecycle model and I would like to spend some time discussing that model. I appreciate that you may be very familiar with the concept of lifecycle models and if this is the case you may wish to simply skim this chapter to familiarize yourself with my use of various terms or pass over it completely. The following chapters put the meat on the bones by discussing each of the lifecycle stages in more detail. The work involved in each stage, the problems that may be encountered and, most importantly, some possible ways of overcoming those problems will be described.

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