Software measurement for small and medium enterprises

Today many large, medium and small software companies experience difficulties in establishing quality improvement initiatives, although we can observe that unlike large companies, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) find it particularly difficult to adapt these quality initiatives. This is further complicated since most software quality initiatives, such as, e.g., CMM and SPICE, primarily address the needs of large software organizations. Thus, in order to provide a basis for the improvement of software quality and productivity also for small software companies, we propose a customized approach to measurement as an essential infrastructure for software quality improvement, which takes into account the specific characteristics and limitations of small enterprises. Our approach basically consists of the integration of the systematic reuse of context-specific quality and resource models in the planning of measurement programs, and of a compaction of the measurement process to a lightweight GQM method in order to reduce the measurement overhead. The approach is based on our experiences in applying measurement in software SMEs, and first results are presented.