Collecting, Integrating and Analyzing Software Metrics and Personal Software Process Data

Measures represent important data in all engineering disciplines. This data allows engineers to understand how things work and how to make changes to produce desired results. In software engineering, it is difficult to collect useful measures because developers do not consider it an important activity, compared to coding. Moreover, manual collected data is often affected by errors, making it unusable. The shortage of automated tools for collecting and analyzing measures does not contribute to the evolution of software engineering. We present PROM (PRO Metrics), an automated tool for collecting and analyzing software metrics as well as personal software process (PSP) data. The tool uses an architecture based on plug-ins that automatically collects data from development tools.