Metrics in software process assessment, quality assurance and risk assessment

The current NASA environment mirrors the changes taking place in the nation at large. We are required to do more for less. For software developers, the message is clear: we must understand our software processes better and manage our developments more carefully while maintaining a high degree of reliability. To this end we use a software process model and software metrics. We are interested in the "quality" of the code, its maintainability, and its potential for reuse and risk assessment. This paper describes a four-year data collection and analysis methodology called the Software Process Assessment (SPA). Measurement of the process and the software produced are the critical elements of SPA. We describe the metrics and discuss some preliminary results and applications.>