Kent Beck of The Three Rivers Institute said “development is heavily dependent on communication.” Kenji Hiranabe of Change Vision used the term “communication game” as a major attribute of development. Communication is equally instrumental to the value and success of the process of measurement as it is to the process of development. The goal of software metrics is communications. A metrics program acts as a platform to connect metrics users and data providers. The world of software measurement has leveraged numerous tools and tactics to share information and foster communication. The strategies, tools and processes that support communication needed to be fostered. The new generation of community based collaboration tools and techniques ranging from WIKIs to annotated big pictures hold great promise for creating an environment for communication and developing community. Early application of these tools show great promise when decentralization can break through corporate culture.
Development of a single metric that can be easily explained holds great promise as a means for simplifying communication needs. A single metric will simplify communication needs if (and it is a big if), the metric can be developed that is easily explainable and is it as useful in predicting performance as most metrics are in reflecting performance. While there are many elements of good communication such as a simple message, ensuring the communication has few moving parts and is relevant to the receiver are critical. A simple metric by definition has few moving parts. Simplicity and relevance and our design requirements which can be controlled (hopefully) by the measurement group.
Developing a single metric is a tall order for a single metric which is why most approaches to this problem use indexes (such as Larry Putnam’s P. I.). Indices are generally more difficult (albeit there are exceptions such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average) to understand to wider audiences or fall into the overly academic trap requiring a trained a cadre to generate and interpret them. A compromise is to use a balanced scorecard to reduce the number of metrics without the need to create an artificial metric.
