Guideline: Practical Software and Systems Measurement
This guideline addresses the relationship between the Performance Measurement practice and system and the Practical Software and Systems Measurement (PSM), plus it provides usage guidelines for both.
Main Description

Overview of Practical Software and Systems Measurement (PSM)

One of the most challenging tasks in developing and maintaining software or systems is to meet critical project cost, schedule, and technical objectives. With more complex capabilities in today's software applications, products, and systems, effective management of development and maintenance efforts is a key factor in project success. Practical Software and Systems Measurement (PSM) was developed to help managers meet these challenges through measurement. It describes an information-driven measurement process that will address the unique technical and business goals of your organization.

PSM is currently available as a stand-alone plug-in for IBM® Rational® Method Composer Version 7.5. In addition, the IBM® Rational Unified Process® (RUP®) plug-in for Practical Software and Systems Measurement (PSM) integrates the measurement activities, artifacts, and concepts described by PSM, thus replacing the measurement concepts provided by the RUP base framework. By deploying this plug-in, your organization and projects will have more extensive measurement guidance to help you track progress in project costs, schedules, and technical objectives.

More information on the PSM plug-ins is available on IBM developerWorks.

Relationship Between PSM and the Performance Measurement Practice

The guidance in PSM represents the best practices used by measurement professionals within complex software and system acquisition and engineering communities. Although PSM can support many types of projects – large and small – PSM’s measurement practices have largely been used and applied on large government, DoD (Department of Defense), and commercial software and systems projects and programs. Therefore, its primary focus is on larger, more formal software and systems engineering project and program efforts where conformance with formal standards and methodologies is required, as this diagram illustrates:

Relationships between PSM and standards

The Performance Measurement practice provides guidance based on multi-tiered measurement that categorizes measurements based on business, operational, and practice objectives. This does not mean that the performance measurement system is incompatible with PSM; rather, it is complementary and provides a different way of looking at the key objectives of measurement. Where the PSM primarily focuses on project- and program-level measurement, the performance measurement system includes business- and operational-level measurements. In addition, the performance measurement system includes concepts and measures that can easily be applied with agile development management techniques.

Usage Guidance

Both the PSM and performance measurement system can be applied on many different project types and sizes, from small to large projects, as well as large, complex software and systems. As general guidance, IT organizations that are new to measurement might want to start with the performance measurement system. Small agile projects, as well as projects applying agile development techniques, should also consider starting with the performance measurement system.

Large complex software and systems engineering projects that require a more formal and rigorous measurement process as well as organizations who have already established PSM, should consider the Practical Software and Systems Measurement family of plug-ins for Rational Method Composer. In addition, organizations that need to align closely with ISO/IEC 15939, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), as well as other standards based on ISO/IEC 15939 (e.g., ISO 12207, 15288, and others) may also want to start with the PSM plug-in. The PSM plug-in has been extended for the Rational Unified Process, or RUP.

Again, this guidance does not mean that you should use either one or the other. In fact, content from both could be applied by an organization that uses IBM Rational Method Composer.