Towards anchoring software measures on elements of the process model

It is widely accepted that software measurement should be automated by proper tool support whenever possible and reasonable. While many tools exist that support automated measurement, most of them lack the possibility to reuse defined metrics and to conduct the measurement in a standardized way. This article presents an approach to anchor software measures on elements of the process model. This makes it possible to define the relevant software measures independently of a concrete project. At project runtime the work breakdown structure is used to establish a link between the measurement anchor points within the process model and the project entities that actually have to be measured. Utilizing the project management tool Maven, a framework has been developed that allows to automate the measurement process.