Glossary · Automation software engineering and architecture
Software metric
Also known as: Code metric
German: Softwaremetrik
In software engineering, a software metric is a quantitative measure of a property of software or its development process, such as size, complexity, test coverage or defect density.
- Software engineering
In one sentence
A software metric quantifies a property of software or its development process, such as size, complexity or test coverage.
Example
The team tracks cyclomatic complexity per function block and reviews every block above an agreed threshold before release.
How it applies
- Engineering: Metrics such as complexity, coupling, coverage and duplicated code indicate where code is hard to test or maintain. Static analysis tools compute many of them automatically, also for IEC 61131-3 code.
- Management: Metrics support decisions only when interpreted in context. Targets on a single metric tend to be gamed and lose meaning.
- Documentation: Documentation has metrics too: topic count, reuse rate, readability, broken links, time to update after a change. Reporting them alongside software metrics makes documentation effort visible in the project.
Product vs. process metric
Product metrics measure the software itself (complexity, size). Process metrics measure how it is developed (lead time, defect detection rate). Both are useful; they answer different questions.