Towards a catalog format for software metrics

Abstract

In the past two decades both the industry and the research community have proposed hundreds of metrics to track software projects, evaluate quality or estimate effort. Unfortunately, it is not always clear which metric works best in a particular context. Even worse, for some metrics there is little evidence whether the metric measures the attribute it was designed to measure. In this paper we propose a catalog format for software metrics as a first step towards a consolidated overview of available software metrics. This format is designed to provide an overview of the status of a metric in a glance, while providing enough information to make an informed decision about the use of the metric. We envision this format to be implemented in a (semantic) wiki to ensure that relationships between metrics can be followed with ease.