Managing software projects by applying AMI

Symptoms of the recent software crisis such as budget and schedule overruns or reliability and quality problemsforce the software industry to search for appropriate techniques to control and improve the software development process. A widely used approach to gain control over a software development environment is the quantification of the problems areas in terms of product, process and resource metrics. The ESPRIT II project 5494 AMI (Application of Metrics in Industry) aims to establish a new goal-oriented overall applicable approach that includes all advantages of existing strategies. It shall lead AMI to the status of a de facto European standard. The main outcome of AMI, the so-called “Metrics Users' Handbook” is targeting a wide range of people involved into software development and provides a detailed description of the approach covered by the four main AMI activities: Assess, Analyse, Metricate, Improve A rationale for AMI usage, description of the approach and experience gained during the validation are shown in this paper.