Integrating Metrics into a Large-Scale Software Development Environment

Software metrics have been shown to be indicators of software complexity. These complexity indicators identify error-prone, unmaintainable software, which if identified early can be rewritten and/or thoroughly tested. However, the integration of metric use into commercial situations faces practical resistance from budget and deadline restrictions. This paper presents an experiment that introduces a nondisruptive method for integrating metrics into a large-scale commercial software development environment.