Making Software Measurement Standards Understandable

Paper in proceeding, 2020

© 2020 ACM. Every discipline, e.g. medicine and engineering, has its own vocabulary to describe situations and tools. This dedicated language is important, because it allows for being specific, detailed and precise. On the other hand, this language, specific to each discipline, becomes a barrier for communication across disciplines. International software measurement standards are examples of such language. The standards are documents that provide definitions of terms used and describe processes specific to the discipline of software measurement. However, one major problem we have observed is that standards are difficult to read and to understand; even for the stakeholders that they are intended for. In this paper, we present our experience report from introducing standards to the work of a large software development organization at an infrastructure provider company. We describe one of the concepts that we found essential in making the measurement standards understandable, namely the notion of the indicator.