The (Software) Doctor is in...Software Vital Signs for Managing the Development of Your Embedded Software

Very few embedded engineers and managers understand the importance of collecting metrics to understand and improve the software engineering process. If metrics are collected they are not used effectively to manage the software development process, which means few engineering teams have no idea whether they are improving or getting worse. In this talk, I will describe how to create a system for collecting and managing the most important software metrics for embedded software. I will use actual industry data in the examples I show to demonstrate these techniques. We will discuss some automation techniques that can help in the collection, as well as some display technology and techniques for trending and highlighting key aspects of the data. We will also survey some commercial and open source tools that can be used to collect the software vital signs.