11.3 THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

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You are almost ready to go. You have built the components of your metrics program, the database is waiting to take data from these components and to analyze it, and your feedback mechanisms are in place. You have set up the support infrastructure for your program.

If you have decided to use local metrics coordinators or facilitators within the engineering groups and you have selected these, then you are ready to train them. In most situations there is only one thing left to do: management must now be committed to the implementation of the program.

If you have consulted with your potential users through the development of the program, remembering that senior management is a very important customer of your program, then this vital step will be much easier. If you have sat in an ivory tower, building your program in isolation, shut of from the development and management functions of the organization then you will probably get no further.

As always, how you gain management commitment for implementation will depend upon the culture of your organization but I would suggest that a presentation supported by endorsements from the Metrics Coordination Group and a detailed report is probably your best option. You will almost certainly have to present some form of cost/benefit analysis at this point.

Unless you are extremely lucky, the best you will be able to do is prepare this using sensible assumptions as to the benefits. Be realistic but also challenging. Use your business plan to present a simple cash flow analysis over, say, five years. If you can get help from the financial people then do so. It all helps.

In the end, commitment to implementing a Software Metrics program depends on two things. You have to present a proposal to the business that is coherent, complete and that offers the business the opportunity to realize real benefits. Also, the business has to be ready for it! It is no good offering software development the capability to predict field reliability based on obscure statistical techniques if they have never even bothered to collect defect data before. Equally the business must be mature enough to realize that there are serious problems in trying to develop software without management control, without a sensible degree of discipline and without clear goals.

Finally, the business must realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that the only certainty is uncertainty. These may be cliches but they are true. A metrics program costs money to operate but it can be money well spent. Organizations that use Software Metrics effectively also realize that there are few off-the-shelf solutions. Some of what they do will not pay off but if they follow the common-sense approach of gathering clear requirements for metrics techniques, and if they take care to design adopt or adapt solutions, their chances of success are much higher.

Once you have everything ready, once you have management commitment then all you have to do is implement the program. Wave the wand and watch it all happen.

If only it were so!

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