Data collection and descriptive analysis: a first step for developing quality software

Software measurement activities can be partitioned into the descriptive, decision support and method effectiveness assessment phases, which parallel the defined, managed, and optimized levels of the US Department of Defense Software Engineering Institute´s (SEI´s) software maturity framework. The authors describe the descriptive phase of software measurement and give an example of the measurement activities involved in the descriptive phase of the Guidance and Control Software (GCS) project, which is a specific flight-critical software project. The descriptive phase of measurement consists of data collection and descriptive analysis. This analysis can provide insight into the relationship between specific development and test techniques and is a first step toward achieving an optimized software development process