COMMUNICATION METRICS FOR SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT

We present empirical evidence that metrics on communication artifacts generated by groupware tools can be used to gain significant insight i nto the development process that produced them. We describe a test-bed for developing and testing communication metrics, a senior level soft ware engineering project course at Carnegie Mellon University, in whic h we conducted several studies and experiments from 1991-1996 with mor e than 400 participants. Such a test-bed is an ideal environment for e mpirical software engineering, providing sufficient realism while allo wing for controlled observation of important project parameters. We de scribe three proof-of-concept experiments to illustrate the value of c ommunication metrics in software development projects. Finally, we pro pose a statistical framework based on structural equations for validat ing these communication metrics.