The meeting I and Magnus had with Dag König today was very rewarding. I feel like it's much more clear now what our objectives with the project are (and thank you Dag for the sweater ;-) ).

I'll try to summarize the meeting.

Dag showed us some books, and we got to look through some of them. We will try to find the titles in the university library tomorrow, and hopefully we'll have the chance to borrow them there. If that's not possible, Dag or Nils could probably supply us with the necessary titles.

We tried to narrow down the type of software project to have in mind when evaluating software metrics. We concluded that we will only look at projects developed using the MSF Agile process. The project leader of a software project will be the role we will primarily have in our mind when evaluating the metrics. Developer will have a secondarily priority as target readers of the metrics. We discussed if size, design (method, patterns, etc) or type of application must be further delimited. No decision was made upon that point, so the future work will show if we have to specify these attributes or not.

Dag also presented his visions and what he would like to have as an endresult. We concluded that the work could be divided into four parts:

0. Define what we mean with code metrics
Here we must define the terminology so we all agree on what we are going to look at. This is a very important part, and we will present a conclusion before October 1st, 2007.

1. Analyze and fiind relevant code metrics
At this point we will (with the restrictions on project type and role mentioned above in mind) find out what metrics that are relevant to use. If the metrics isn't already implemented in VSTS, then they will be. Exactly how this is done was discussed during the meeting. Probably we will have to write our own Add-in to VSTS. Another option is to extend the now available code metric tool, but we do not now how complex that solution would be (or if the tool is extendable at all?).

2. Implement in TFS
When we have our relevant metrics in VSTS, we will implement some type of functionality in TFS which allows saving code metric data in the data warehouse. This allows for reports regarding code metrics to be generated, and it will be possible to see some history and progress (regarding the metric values of the project).

3. Implement a Dashboard
This is just an extension of point 2 above. The purpose is to make some kind of quality indicator in the project portal, where even people outside the project (investors, customers, etc) are able to see the progress and current quality level of the project.

Some other thoughts expressed during the meeting:

Our objective could also be to analyze what the existing code metrics are saying about the quality of the project. Then decide what you should do about it to improve the stats. In this part it is also important to define what depicts good (and bad, respectively) numbers.

The Code Analysis engine could probably be used somehow to implement some kind of code metric. The same engine could also be used to enforce policies for checking in code (which then should be based on some kind of code metric).

Code metrics for SQL was an interesting subject, which would mean that we would have to take a deeper look on the Database Professional edition of VSTS.

We would like to perform some kind of empirical investigation - interviews, visit the industry and perform studies, etc. We hope that either Microsoft or the university (or both!) could assist us in finding subjects for interview. If the interviews are performed live or via phone, email, or other media doesn't really matter. We would just like to complement the theory with the practical reality.

We will have 14 days to conclude the first point mentioned above (point 0.). At the 1st of October, 1600, we will have a Live Meeting with Dag (and hopefully Nils too) where we will show what we have concluded. Of course I will hare the results with you readers of my blog too.

Of course we had discussions about a bunch of other stuff, but these were the relevant parts (please do remind me if I missed something essential, Dag and Magnus!)

My TODO-list:

• Define Code Metrics
• Find VSTS/TFS books in the library and notify Dag which were found (if any)
  
• Come to a conclusion if we will get an office at the university or not (urgent!)
  
• Get some answers on how to solve the practical problem with laptops to borrow (urgent!)
  
• Check out Reflector and code metrics (low prio as of now)

Over and out.