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What Do Your Metrics Say to You?


Borland looks into issues with data around app development projects

By Jeff Feinman
December 11, 2007 — 
Companies are spending a great deal of energy and money on gathering useless metrics and data around application development projects, according to Borland Software.

Borland, with the help of Forrester Research, interviewed 20 application development organizations selected by Forrester and found organizations frequently rely on metrics in software projects with little or no value to the development process. The results were released yesterday. The most commonly tracked metrics, according to the study, consist of “post-mortem” project management metrics: schedule, costs and defects.

“Application development organizations all too often waste their time and money chasing after metrics that don't help them improve their operations,” said Carey Schwaber, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. “Many settle for what they call ‘industry standard’ metrics, but they are really just the metrics that everyone else happens to have settled for. Why does everyone gravitate toward these metrics, which include on-time, on-budget and on-scope? They're easy to measure, even if they're not particularly meaningful until the project is over.”

But these metrics don’t offer any insight for businesses with regard to making sure the right projects and actions are being carried out, according to the report. Borland officials said there should be more focus on metrics about business value, and data around the application development project itself.

“There are lots and lots of easy metrics to collect,” argued Marc Brown, vice president of product marketing at Borland. “There are many metrics collected in the requirements management phase, in the development phase,” but these often fail to measure the value of a project, he claimed. “That’s why we consider them very superficial.”

Where the Good Stuff Is
Instead, what organizations should be collecting, Brown noted, is data with business value, customer value and tactical value. Tactical metrics address the readiness of a project, if the product has been tested, and what vulnerabilities exist in the product. Business value, declared Brown, is something that not many organizations are doing today because it is a “second-order measurement” and entails the gathering of different data points from the engineering, marketing and sales departments. Customer value is determined by customer usability surveys and customer adoption.

Brown noted that the study found that organizations are looking for metrics in six key areas: the ability to improve the predictability for software delivery, readiness of the project, business value, customer satisfaction, the ability to use inner resources and processes efficiently, and more vertically focused metrics around the software life cycle.


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