Applications of measurement in product-focused process improvement: a comparative industrial case study

In ESPRIT project PROFES, measurement according to the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) approach is conducted in industrial software projects at Drager Medical Technology, Ericsson Finland, and Schlumberger Retail Petroleum Systems. A comparative case study investigates three different ways of applying GQM in product-focused process improvement: long-term GQM measurement programmes at the application sites to better understand and improve software products and processes; GQM-based construction and validation of product/process dependency models, which describe the process impact on software quality; and cost/benefit investigation of the PROFES improvement methodology using GQM for (meta-) analysis of improvement programmes. This paper outlines how GQM is applied for these three purposes.