SEO software development: How can you control a project without measuring it?

When a project is in process and do not have any issues, measurement is necessary. How can you determine if your project is not in trouble if you do not measure its health?

Measurement is required for assessing the status of your projects, procedures, products and resources. Because you never know what might happen in a project. That is why it is necessary to record and register a project’s both good and bad characteristics. You see we must control our project and not just run them. How can you control a project without measuring it?

There are many reasons to consider project measurements; as a result the measurement will be a quality engineering activity. It is not sufficient if you only measure your software, you should be specific in what your managers require to know and what your end-users need to be informed.

For instance managers need to know:

- The project’s cost: You need to know the time and effort involved in different processes that compromise your software production

- Staff’s productivity: You should find out how long does it take for your employees (programmers) to design it, program it and test it.

- Coding quality: You should measure software quality such as: registering problems, failures, changes and predict whether the project will be successful. You should set target for your software processes

- User satisfaction: One need to measure all steps that have been implemented in project according to user’s requirement. You should measure usability, reliability, response time and software performance

- Improvement factors: You should measure the time it takes to perform every development activity and calculate the benefits of each part in order to find out whether or not the benefit is worth the project cost

What engineers need to know when developing a project?

- Testing : An engineer should analyze each process to determine objective ways and process’s functionality. For instance: how to find out if a system is reliable and find out its mean time to failure must be greater than 16 elapsed hours of CPU time.

- Finding faults: Measuring number of faults in the use case, design, code and testing plan. You should trace back to their root causes

- Process goals: characteristic of processes that tell you whether you have met the standards and met the process goal

- Predicting the program performance in future: To measure future maintenance problems. By investigating current processes, you will be able to future problems.

Why we do measure software? We need to understand, control and improve the program. You see measurement is important in three steps: first, we will understand what is happening during our software development and maintenance. By establishing the base line we will be able to set goals for our product in order to predict its future behavior. Second, Measuring software allows us to control it and understand its goals and find out whether we can meet those goals or not. Third, software measurement helps us to improve processes for example: we can augment the number of type of design we do based on measurement of software quality and design quality.

In conclusion software measurement is necessary to improve software quality and usability.