Adoption and use of new metrics in a large organization: A case study

The success of a software development project is linked to the ability of the project team to deliver high quality artifacts within the budget and on schedule. Thus, a holistic and in-process view of various software metrics that help characterize the current health and future trajectory of the project is crucial. However, these metrics need to be at the right level of granularity and be derived objectively from the project environment to be effective and useful. While the metric literature is rich with proposals of specific metrics and their formulation, there are very few studies which discuss how organizations respond to introduction of such metrics and how they are used and adopted. In this paper, we present such a study on a set of metrics embodied by a framework called PIVoT. This study aims at evaluating the impact of PIVoT, a tool for in-process and non-invasive monitoring of project health, and performing a fine-grained analysis of the adoption of metrics and insights this tool embodies. Here, we present and discuss the results of this survey which are based on feedback from 9 project groups. The results indicate that projects leveraged PIVoT and its metrics well and it aided them to take specific actions that helped their projects. Along with identifying the composite metrics which the project teams find most actionable and insightful, the survey shows that in most cases PIVoT helped them showcase their project to upper management.