Systems Engineering Metrics

This paper describes the internal AT&T Advanced Technology Systems (ATS) concerns with the current high level systems engineering metrics and the ongoing work to improve their definition to better reflect systems engineering's value to the R&D process. The current high level productivity and cost metrics are based on page counts that do not give any indication of the quality of the content on the pages. The systems engineering organization is considering a redefinition of the high level productivity and cost metrics based on function/feature points similar to their definition in software engineering. A constraint is that the revised high level metrics be derivable from the existing detailed systems engineering metrics. These feature/function point based metrics are calibrated to the project mix within AT&T ATS.