Software Performance Measures to Assist Decision Makers within the Rational Unified Process

Rigorous and automatable approaches to software process measurement are a technology essential for supporting decision makers, such as project managers, in obtaining reliable estimations of relevant properties of the development project and in controlling it. We introduce a methodology, called Propean (Project Performance Analysis), which applies classical techniques of performance analysis to a UML model of the development process. For this purpose, the Real-Time UML profile is considered. The analysis of the UML diagrams produces as an output, in automatable way, the time to completion and the utilization rate of employed resources (personnel in this cases). This paper focuses in the application of Propean to the widespread Rational Unified Process (RUP) adapted to a specific industrial project. We describe the steps necessary for Propean application, the typology of results that can be obtained and how project managers can use them for producing estimations about project completion within fixed schedules and budgets.