Artifact: Project Measurements (PSM)
The project measurements artifact is the project's active repository of measurement data. It contains the most current project, resources, process, and product measurements at the primitive and derived level.
Domains: Project Management
Work Product Kinds: Project Data
Purpose

The Project Measurements artifact provides the storage for the project's measurement data. It is kept current as measurements are made, or become, available. It also contains the derived measures that are calculated from the base measures and should also store information (procedures and algorithms, for example) about how the derived measures are obtained. Reports on the status of the project, for example, progress towards goals (functionality, quality, and so on), expenditures, and other resource consumption, are produced using the project measurements (see Artifact: Status Assessment). More frequent, or even apparently continuous, displays of project status are possible using tools where automated software data collection agents feed real-time displays of project status.

Relationships
Description
Brief Outline

The format and contents of the Project Measurements artifact depends on the measures selected and the technology used for collection and storage. It is essentially a database of measurement-value associations and allied information for their collection and calculation. Its form could be as simple as a set of files manually maintained by the Role: Project Manager, but we recommend that the collection and storage be automated and, as far as possible, be made non-intrusive.

Tailoring
Representation Options

On smaller projects, project measurements may exist only as reports from the defect tracking system and a spreadsheet to track progress. On larger or more formal projects, there may be a large selection of measures managed using one or more databases. This may be a distributed artifact, for example, the various measures selected by the Role: Project Manager may be produced by several different tools, with the collection and reporting task being a manual one. Here's another example: the project's progress may be reported from a project plan that is routinely updated by the Role: Project Manager from status information supplied in spreadsheets by team members.

Additional Information

See the Guidelines listed in the More Information section of the header table.

More Information