Instrumenting Measurement Programs with Tools

Advanced software engineering principles imply the management of quality and process based on data from measurement. Such quality management can only be performed efficiently if it is well supported with tools that are care-fully selected, integrated and used in the measurement program. Realizing such support is non-trivial because tools can be used in many aspects of measure-ment. In this paper we describe a framework for setting up measurement tool support for software development processes. The framework explicitly links important measurement concepts with tools. Furthermore, it allows companies to use their existing tools and processes and supports the incremental adoption of measurement programs. We relate our experiences with this framework in two concrete examples of introducing measurement programs.