The Use of Product Measures in Tracking Code Development to Completion within Small to Medium Sized Enterprises

Many companies face the need to produce frequent releases of their software. Yet many do not manage to release on time and within their development schedule. The reasons for this are numerous. We suggest that an accurate insight into progress of a project towards completion would assist a project manager in balancing the various commercial decisions made through the lifetime of the release. We examine the release cycles of three local companies and find that effort estimation is the predominant means of project monitoring. As a solution to difficulties concerning ongoing project monitoring we suggest using product measures and measurement criteria which would assist a project manager when tracking change and progress within a release. We contrast these measures and measure methods to standard change data and suggest that they are more sensitive to the nature of the development activities undertaken.