Software Metrics for Collaborative Software Engineering Projects

Many software metrics have been established in the past to measure the various aspects of the software development process. The scopes of the metrics span across the artifacts, the end product, the process to produce these artifacts, as well as the project management for the process. In recent years, driven by advances in telecommunication, the internet, and wireless technology, and also by economic factors, collaboration in software engineering project has become increasingly popular. As collaboration becomes more widespread, software engineering metrics for collaboration, and new or adapted metrics for collaborative projects, will become more important. Nonetheless, no comprehensive study has been done on the impact of collaboration on development productivity, process structure, or software quality. In this paper, we study some commonly used software metrics to investigate whether collaboration can easily be incorporated, and where possible, to suggest strategies for that incorporation.