Respect the privacy of the data. As an example, if you are collecting work effort distribution data, the number of hours each individual spends working on every development or maintenance phase activity in a week is private to that individual. The total distribution of hours from all team members is private to the project team, and the distribution across all projects is public to everyone in the organization. View and present the data items that are private to individuals only in the aggregate or as averages over the group. Make It a Habit Software measurement doesn t need to be time consuming.
Commercial tools are available for measuring code size and complexity in many programming languages.
Activities like daily time tracking are more of a habit than a burden. Commercial problem tracking tools facilitate counting defects and tracking their status, but this requires the discipline to report all identified defects and to manage them with the tool. Develop simple tracking forms, scripts, and web-based reporting tools to reduce the overhead of collecting and reporting the data. Use spreadsheets and charts to track and report on the accumulated data at regular intervals. Despite the challenges, many software organizations routinely measure aspects of their work.