Performance measures for supporting project manager decisions

Software measurement is a crucial technology along the software development process, andnotably for project management. Decision-making in project management requires in fact,accurate estimations and the support of metrics to monitor and control the varying factorsaffecting the development process.Managers must make reliable schedule predictions and optimize personnel utilization. Theytherefore must be able to dynamically evaluate whether the resources assigned to a job aresufficient and whether the organization structure is adequate to meet the scheduled deadlines.To support managers in these tasks, we propose a method called Propean (for PROjectPErformance ANalysis) based on the combination of classical performance engineeringtechniques and the Unified Modelling Language (UML). The combined application of thesedisciplines guarantees on one hand, a validated approach for modelling and estimating the'Quality of Service' parameters when they come to the development process. Performanceengineering techniques are in fact based on rigorousmathematical formalisms such as queueingnetworks, stochastic Petri nets and Markov models. On the other hand, the adoption of UMLprovides managers with an easy-to-use front-end representation of the process closer to thedesign notations they routinely employ. To illustrate Propean application, in this article, wemodel the case of a manager who must decide a release date for a product undergoing thetesting phase.