OPI model: A methodology for development metric based on outcome oriented

Metric is extremely important for software development. It is a tool for measuring software in both quantitative and qualitative aspects. In addition, metric can be used for determining an achievement of the goals. There are some problems that bring difficulties to the design and development of software metrics. Among them, a number of software perspectives that metrics must handle and the way to apply metrics results to support business outcomes are considered important. This paper proposes OPI as a model for implementing software metrics based on business outcomes. There are three steps in this model, defining outcomes (O), defining perspectives (P), and defining indicators (I). A case study has been developed to assess the use of the proposed model. Forty undergraduate students, who have basic knowledge in software metric, use the model to develop metrics from the case study. The preliminary evaluation is based on usability aspect. The result has show that 85 percents of the students think that the model is easy to understand, where 8 and 7 percents say that it is moderate and hard respectively.