Creating, Measuring and Evaluating a Metric for Software Engineering Performance

Abstract: Software engineering productivity is a metric that can be an indicator for software quality, development efficiency and developer satisfaction. As a result, the metric can be used for managerial decision making and is crucial to the success of a software project. However, even though the importance of the topic is widely accepted, there is no uniform approach to measuring it. In this thesis, we use a design science approach to provide a new objective metric to measuring software engineering productivity based on past literature. The approach uses openly available repository metadata collected by Git and GitHub and is usable for both a classic software engineering approach and an inner source approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate the functionality of our approach by analyzing a software engineering project.

Keywords: inner source, productivity, software metrics, MecoIS

PDF: Master Thesis

Reference: Thomas Wolter. Creating, Measuring, Evaluating a Metric for Software Engineering Performance. Master Thesis. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: 2022.