Software Engineering Institute

In this experience report, we present our experiences of creating, evolving, and validating an automated software architecture measurement system in two large multinational corporations. We will describe the measures that we employed and the tool chains that we constructed to automatically calculate these measures. We will also describe how we got the development teams to accept and apply these measures through pilot studies, surveys, constantly adjusting the measures based on feedback, and correlations with productivity measures. Our experience shows that it is critical to guide the development teams to focus on the underlying problems behind each measure, rather than on the score itself. It is also critical to adopt and recommend state-of-the-art technologies to the development teams. In doing so, they can leverage these technologies to pinpoint, visualize, and quantify architecture problems.