PhD Thesis Dissertation - Murat Salmanoğlu

Title: A PRACTICAL MEASUREMENT CAPABILITY MODEL FOR SOFTWARE ORGANIZATIONS UTILIZING AGILE APPROACHES

PhD Candidate: Murat Salmanoğlu

Program: Information Systems Department 

Date: 16 April Monday 09:00

Place: Conference Hall-01

Abstract: Measurement is the foundation for successful software management. However, it is not easy for software organizations to evaluate their measurement practices and to determine what they should do to improve them. There are models to evaluate capability and maturity of measurement processes. However, they frequently focus on the measurement process with a guidance from a well-defined capability model, like CMMI or SPICE. Many of the software organizations following agile methodologies do not prefer to apply these process-centric maturity models. This study presents a model to assess measurement capability of software organizations by inspecting individual measures, independent from the software development approach and the process architecture organizations use. The model exemplifies measures for aspects and defines generic practices for three capability levels. Organizations can use the model to determine and improve their measurement capability. This research includes action research and exploratory case studies conducted during the development of the model, an explanatory case study conducted to implement the model, and its results. Case studies demonstrate that the model provides additional benefits to organizations utilizing agile approaches while providing similar results with the process-centric models. The findings of the explanatory case study indicate that the results of the model are accepted and found beneficial by the employees from small-, medium- and large-scale organizations that participate in the study.