Process Measurement: Insights from Software Measurement on Measuring Process Complexity, Quality and Performance

Motivated by software (complexity) metrics, several papers about process measurement have been published in recent years proposing metrics for process complexity, quality and/or performance. Starting with an overview about these publications, we identified some weak points (e. g., missing definitions of process complexity and quality as well as a lack of validation work). In this article, we adopt more well-established concepts from the field of software measurement to process measurement: a prediction system measurement approach avoiding a concrete definition of process complexity, measurement and prediction systems and their validation, the goal question metric paradigm for selecting process metrics and different purposes of process metrics (understand, control and improve). The paper closes with an assessment of existing work according to the adopted concepts from software measurement. Thereby, we identified some missing aspects which could be dealt with in future work.

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