Tool support for software measurement, analysis and improvement

This paper presents our strategy, implementation, and experience with tool support for software measurement, analysis, and quality improvement in a commercial software development environment. The activities that need to be supported include: 1) gathering software product and process measurements, 2) analyzing measurement data, and 3) using the results to assess and improve software quality. We employed existing internal tools, commercial off-the-shelf tools, and new tools that we developed to gather and analyze data, and presented results. These tools were tailored to fit the application environments and were integrated through common rules, multiple purpose tools, and utility programs. This approach has been used successfully in supporting software measurement and quality improvement for several large commercial software products developed in the IBM Software Solutions Toronto Laboratory. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Inc.