Why Metrics?

Metrics collection assists project leaders, project managers, and developers to control the development process - therefore leading to more efficient development efforts and quality control. Analyzing metrics over a project lifecycle can assist a team in improved software estimating of efforts, project tracking (if estimates are good), software risk analysis, and assistance in understanding the maturity evolution of project code. Treating the software as a growing creature, it allows a primative but consistent way to monitor various aspects of a software's lifecycle.

As a software project matures, it becomes increasingly important to quantitatively identify changes in code. Quantizing code changes over time ensures that managers, leads, and developers are all on the same page regarding the degree of change occurring.

Metrics can also be used with suites of unit tests to provide an even deeper understanding of the quality of the software as it evolves.

Putting jMetra within the context of a process-driven software organization empowers the developers and project managers to evaluate an effort both during and after deployment, and feed those observations back into the organizations process improvement efforts. Whether you are into Capability Maturity Model and Personal Software Process (CMM/PSP) practices or Extreme Programming (XP), being able to collect project metrics in an automated manner provides a critical piece to controlling the software process.

A Great Opportunity

The fact is, many mature corporate environments do not collect metrics during software development. Excuses range from fear of overhead to difficulty finding out what metrics collection technology to use. Cadillac tools for metrics are typically very expense and offer so many options that usage can be very time consuming and using such a package is typically shelved for the next project. On the other extreme, other free packages simple don't offer the needed options for collecting metrics the way you need them collected. Using jMetra allows you to immediately start collecting some basic metrics in a non-obstrusive manner. By investing an hour to become familiar with jMetra and to set up jMetra for your project, you can proudly say that you now belong to the elite portion of software engineers that actually collect metrics during their development projects! :->