Codermetrics

Getting Started

Let’s say you are interested in using codermetrics, but you have no experience and you are not sure how well they will be received or whether they will provide any benefit. You also aren’t sure which metrics will work the best for you and your software development team. Or, alternatively, let’s say you do have experience with codermetrics, but you have joined a new organization and you’d like to introduce metrics to the team. This section introduces a simple set of steps you can use to introduce and test metrics in either of these cases, and then can be used to expand the use of metrics over time.

Find a Sponsor

Like every project that might eventually expand to wider use in an organization, it is helpful if you identify a project sponsor, or multiple sponsors, up front. A sponsor is someone who has the authority to approve a codermetrics trial in your organization—and if that test is successful, the sponsor can then support or authorize wider use. Typically, an effective sponsor would be one of the more senior people in a software development organization.

You might be the project sponsor yourself—but if not, once you have identified a sponsor candidate you can discuss the ideas for codermetrics and the initial steps outlined in this chapter, including the plan for a focus group and an initial trial. The project sponsor may or may not actually be involved in the trial, but they should be included in the analysis after the test is conducted and will play a key role ...