S. Mclellan et al., EXPERIENCE USING WEB-BASED SHOTGUN MEASURES FOR LARGE-SYSTEM CHARACTERIZATION AND IMPROVEMENT, IEEE transactions on software engineering, 24(4), 1998, pp. 268-277
This article discusses our experience in using a World Wide Web-based
shotgun measurement approach for mining and characterizing large softw
are systems. The approach recognizes that measurement information is e
ssentially management information, that different levels and functions
of the organizational hierarchy require different information to make
decisions, and that a measurement program is typically a discovery pr
ocess about an organization's current modes of operations. What we fou
nd was the usefulness of a measurement program that also allows manage
rs to dynamically formulate new goals and get answers to questions not
specifically related to original goals but raised nonetheless by metr
ic data. We describe three specific cases of decisions that were made
using this approach and data collected from one large system and acces
sed using the company's intranet over the past two years.