In-process metrics for software testing

In-process tracking and measurements play a critical role in software devel opment, particularly for software testing. Although there are many discussi ons and publications on this subject and numerous proposed metrics, few in- process metrics are presented with sufficient experiences of industry imple mentation to demonstrate their usefulness. This paper describes several in- process metrics whose usefulness has been proven with ample implementation experiences at the IBM Rochester AS/400(R) software development laboratory. For each metric, we discuss its purpose, data, interpretation, and use and present a graphic example with real-life data. We contend that most of the se metrics, with appropriate tailoring as needed, are applicable to most so ftware projects and should be an integral part of software testing.