The ami approach - An Insight to a Quantitative approach to Process Improvement

Here is sharing with you all something I read and learnt from multiple sources on the Internet about one of the approaches of metrics in the industry.

ami - (application of metrics in industry) was a two-year project, which commenced in December 1990 under sponsorship of DG XIII of the Commission of the European Communities through the ESPRIT programme promoting the use of measurement in software development. The goal of this project was to develop a practical approach and to validate it on a variety of projects all over Europe.

The ami paradigm (Assess, Analyze, Metricate, Improve) is comparable to the Shewart cycle - PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) for process improvement. ami, was developed for software measurement mainly in the context of software process improvement, based on PDCA cycle. This methodology is stepwise iterative, incremental, goal-oriented procedure coupling together a model-based process assessment technique with a quantitative approach to software development issues from the viewpoint of the process, product and resources.

There are twelve steps in this approach, which are grouped by three in the activities:

Assess: This activity deals with the assessment of the software development environment for defining the primary goals for metrication.

1. Step 1: The weaknesses and critical parts of software development process are emphasized.
2. Step 2: From the findings of Step 1, the primary goals are defined. Here we consider a hierarchy of top level goals depending on the maturity of the development process. We need to envisage understanding the goals (support of project management with process and product metrics), before setting up the change goals (improvement of productivity while maintaining quality). The assumption behind improvement goals is that the process is well defined.
3. Step 3: A Validation of goals is set up to be performed against the assessment conclusions, the timeline and the budget to avoid too ambitious goals

Analyze: The aim of this activity is to build a goal-tree.

1. Step 4: The primary goals are translated into sub-goals and metrics
2. Step 5: Primary goals are broken down into more manageable sub-goals until directly quantifiable goals are reached. The process is based on the Goal / Question / Metric paradigm.
3. Step 6: After verifying the consistency of the tree, metrics are derived from these bottom goals with the help of questions. The results are a documented goal tree and the associated set of metrics.

Metricate: This activity aims at setting up a measurement program, collating and verifying data.

1. Step 7: Writing the measurement plan which is the reference document for collection and analysis of data and for ease of tracing of these tasks
2. Step 8: Collecting the data
3. Step 9: Verifying the Data.

Improve: This activity aims at exploitation of measures that are required to be performed in reference with the goals defined in the analyze activity.

1. Step 10: The improvement activity starts with an appropriate presentation of the measurement data.
2. Step 11: Graphics (histograms, pie charts, scatter plot) should present the data so that both trend and outliers can be detected
3. Step 12: By relating data to goals, it is to be determined whether the goals are fulfilled, how quickly they are fulfilled or why they did fail. Further corrective and / or improving actions are based on this determination. The first loop is achieved. Now, it is worth quantifying the first benefits of the measurement programme.

The iterative aspects of the approach permits not only by a reassessment, the refinement of goals and consequently the metrics set, but also the improvement of the metrication process.

- Sujatha Das