Define the Primary Management Goals
Purpose
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To determine and record the important functional, non-functional, budgetary and schedule
requirements and constraints, which need to be tracked.
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The Project Manager should decide which of the project's requirements and constraints are important enough
to require an objective monitoring program. Additionally, organizational requirements may be imposed that
are related to business needs (cost reduction, time-to-market and productivity improvements), not directly
to project needs. Typically, a project manager will want to track the growth in capability and reliability
of the software under construction, as well as expenditures (effort, schedule, other resources), and there
may be performance and other quality requirements, as well as memory and processor constraints. See Guideline: Metrics for more details. The sources of
information for selection of goals include the Vision, Risk List and Business Case, as well as organizational requirements and
constraints not specified in the Rational Unified Process.
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Validate the Goals
Purpose
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To review the relevance, clarity, feasibility and sufficiency of the selected goals
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The Project Manager should review the selected goals with relevant stakeholders to ensure that the focus of
the goals selected is correct, that there is adequate coverage of all areas of interest and risk, that it
is possible to reduce the goals to collectible metrics and that adequate resources can be committed to the
measurement program.
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Define the Subgoals
Purpose
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Analyze complex goals to determine subgoals to which metrics can be applied
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It may be difficult or impossible to formulate direct measures for some high-level or complex goals.
Instead it is necessary to decompose such a goal into simpler subgoals, which together will contribute to
the achievement of the high-level goal. For example, project costs will not usually be tracked simply
through a single overall cost figure, but through some Work Breakdown Structure, with budget allocated to
lower levels and cost information collected at this lower level of granularity. The depth of decomposition
should be limited to a maximum of two levels of breakdown below the primary or high-level goal. This is to
limit the amount of data collection and reduction needed, and because it may become very difficult in deep
hierarchies to be sure that tracking the subgoals is really contributing to understanding progress against
the high-level goal.
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Identify the Metrics Required to Satisfy the Subgoals
Purpose
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To determine the metrics which will enable the subgoals to be tracked
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The task here is to associate the subgoals with some entity or work product with measurable properties or
attributes. Metrics that are objective and easily quantified are to be preferred.
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Identify the Primitive Metrics Needed to Compute the Metrics
Purpose
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To determine the basic measurements that will be used to derive the metrics
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In this step, the elementary data items, from which the metrics will be derived, are identified. These are
the items that will need to be collected.
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Write the Measurement Plan
The Measurement Plan captures the goals, subgoals and the associated metrics
and primitive metrics. It will also identify the resources (for example Project Measurements) and
responsibilities for the metrics program.
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Evaluate the Measurement Plan
Purpose
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To check the Measurement Plan for consistency, clarity,
appropriateness, feasibility and completeness
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The Project Manager should have the Measurement Plan reviewed by the following:
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people directly engaged in the metrics program (in the default organization, the Assessment Team, see
Guideline: Software Development Plan: Project Organization
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the Project Review Authority (PRA)
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a metrics expert external to the project, unless individuals in the Assessment Team are experts
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Put in Place the Collection Mechanisms
Purpose
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To establish the means to collect, record, reduce and report the planned measurements
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The instructions, procedures, tools and repositories for metrics collection,
computation, display and reporting have to be acquired or produced, installed
and set-to-work according to the Measurement Plan. This will include the Project Measurements artifact.
See Guideline: Metrics.
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