Software Engineering Institute

The process of gathering and summarizing operational data to produce clear and interpretable displays of metrics can sometimes resemble the process of making sausage, especially if you have no tools to help you. This presentation will provide a brief demonstration of tools created by staff at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute that help scan, analyze, and prepare data to be used on a weekly metrics report for one of our customers. The tools, and the process we’ve devised for using them, allow us to produce a weekly metrics report on behalf of a government program office. The data come directly from the contractor’s database, and the metrics report allows the government to have information derived by a neutral third party to help trigger productive conversations during status meetings. These government-owned metrics supplement what the contractor provides (rather than being redundant) and provide an independent basis for analyzing trends and patterns highlighted by the contractor-reported metrics.