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What metrics do you really use?
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Steve Fahlbusch
Ranch Hand
Joined: Sep 18, 2000
Posts: 491
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Greetings all, Shortly I will be presenting to my graduate course in Object Oriented Systems Development a discussion on metrics (sort of being team taught between the professor and myself) - I have my short list of must have metrics on a project, he has his (mostly the same) - and that is why I am posting - I was hoping for more variance. So any of you that are involved with OOSD would you be kind enough to post what metrics you gather - and what metrics you (or your team) really use. Thanks in advance. -steve
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Ernest Friedman-Hill
author and iconoclast
Marshal
Joined: Jul 08, 2003
Posts: 24054
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I'm on an XP team whose nightly metrics report includes counts of (cutting and pasting Unit testsJava source filesJava classesJava total source linesJava unit-test source linesJava non-test linesTotal code lines analyzedUnexecuted linesTest coveragePassing functional testsFailing functional testsUnexpected failuresSkipped functional testsUses of "instanceof"/KLOC The ones we actually use are unit test coverage percentage, functional test pass/fail, and especially "Unexpected failures". Our functional test framework lets you mark a test as "I know this one doesn't pass yet." Unexpected functional test failures are ones that used to work and are now broken. We used to look at unit test count and line count a lot, earlier in the project, to see how it grew and pat ourselves on the back. We never think about those anymore.
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[Jess in Action][AskingGoodQuestions]
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Lasse Koskela
author
Sheriff
Joined: Jan 23, 2002
Posts: 11962
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Ernest, which coverage tool you guys use?
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Author of Test Driven (2007) and Effective Unit Testing (2013) [Blog] [HowToAskQuestionsOnJavaRanch]
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Stan James
(instanceof Sidekick)
Ranch Hand
Joined: Jan 29, 2003
Posts: 8791
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HERE are some metrics we tracked regarding project size (scope), velocity and progress. High visibility tracking and reporting make it hard to cover up progress problems with spin! There's a whole science around defect tracking, when they were introduced, found and corrected. Over a series of releases it gives you a statistical level of confidence that the current release has a low enough number of defects to ship. I had about 1 day exposure to all this in a class - I'll see if I can dig up any references.
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A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of the idea. John Ciardi
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Ernest Friedman-Hill
author and iconoclast
Marshal
Joined: Jul 08, 2003
Posts: 24054
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Ernest, which coverage tool you guys use?
Something I wrote myself which does bytecode instrumentation. It's OK, but we're thinking of moving to Clover, which looks much nicer.
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Lasse Koskela
author
Sheriff
Joined: Jan 23, 2002
Posts: 11962
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Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill: Something I wrote myself which does bytecode instrumentation.
Haven't you ever written anything normal?
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Steve Fahlbusch
Ranch Hand
Joined: Sep 18, 2000
Posts: 491
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Thanks for the feedback. Do you ever use metrics such as complexity measures or volume (optimal algorithm measures) and error estimation such as Halstead equations?
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Ernest Friedman-Hill
author and iconoclast
Marshal
Joined: Jul 08, 2003
Posts: 24054
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I've worked with the same small development team for quite a few years now, and we're confident in our own and each other's coding ability. I imagine that if we had a larger team, where we were bringing in people to whom we didn't have these ties, then we'd want to use complexity metrics and other code quality measures to make sure overall quality was being kept up.
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subject: What metrics do you really use?
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