Abstract

People often think that measurement and metrics cost a lot of money, while in fact, when applied properly, they save a lot of money… and prevent a lot of trouble! However, it’s not easy to successfully use software metrics in contracts, mainly because of the lack of standardized measurement processes of the companies working in the industry. Even though there are ISO/IEC standards for functional sizing, e.g. the Nesma FPA method, using metrics based on functional size often remains difficult in contracts between software customers and software suppliers. Nesma therefore introduces a guideline on how to use software metrics in contracts, and in contracting, which should guide both customer organizations and supplier organizations on issues like what to measure, how to measure, which metrics to define, how to assess reality value of proposals, how to benchmark, and what questions to ask in the contracting phase.

The main purpose of this guideline is to increase the success rate of software projects and maintenance contracts. The guideline is composed by this initial describing document and a number of mini guides that are going to be published in the near future. The mini guides that are now planned are:
[02] Mini Guide for Development Methodologies
[03] Mini Guide for Maintenance
[04] Mini Guide for Management
[05] Mini Guide for RFP questions
[06] Mini Guide for Functional Quality
[07] Mini Guide for Pricing Mechanisms
[08] Mini Guide for Technical Quality
[09] Mini Guide for Assessing Suppliers Performance
[10] Mini Guide for Software Metrics based on FPA
[11] Mini Guide: Requirements for Supplier organizations
[12] Mini Guide: Requirements for Customer organizations
[13] Mini Guide: Functional Testing

But other mini guides may follow.

These documents should be interesting to all people involved in contracting software development and maintenance in both client organizations and supplier organizations (not limited):
– Procurement
– Bid management
– Vendor management
– Supplier management
– Demand management
– Delivery management
– Account management
– ICT management
– Software Cost Engineers
– Business management
– Project management
This describing document is available for free for everybody to download.

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