Lars Grammel, Holger Schackmann, Horst Lichter. BugzillaMetrics - Design of an adaptable tool for evaluating user-defined metric specifications on change requests. In MetriKon 2007: DASMA Software Metrik Kongress. November 2007.
The evaluation of metrics on the data available in change request management (CRM) systems can give valuable information for the management of software development. It can for example be helpful in assessing the current workload, product quality or development process weaknesses.
Metrics and charts on change requests are already available in current CRM systems. They provide information about common metrics, but their adaptability is limited with respect to the specification of metrics customized to organization-specific needs.
This paper describes a more flexible approach for the evaluation of metrics on change requests. The core part of the presented tool is an event driven evaluation algorithm for the calculation of time series data. It is parametrized with user defined metric specifications. This enables a separation between metric specification and information retrieval. Further design decisions enable a transparent execution optimization and an abstraction from the data sources of the underlying CRM database.