Le metriche software sono degli standard di misura. Il termine metriche è utilizzato per indicare un insieme di misure specifiche definite per un particolare processo.

Le metriche giocano un ruolo chiave nell'ingegneria del software: per poter migliorare qualità, prestazioni e produttività, le organizzazioni necessitano di poter misurare ad ogni stadio del ciclo di vita il proprio software.

L'utilità di questi strumenti è utile per

• Migliorare il processo software
• Pianificare e seguire l'andamento di un progetto
• Valutare la qualità del prodotto
• Stimare lo sforzo richiesto per sviluppare un software con determinati requisiti

A software metric is a measure of some property of a piece of software or its specifications. Since quantitative measurements are essential in all sciences, there is a continuous effort bycomputer science practitioners and theoreticians to bring similar approaches to software development. The goal is obtaining objective, reproducible and quantifiable measurements, which may have numerous valuable applications in schedule and budget planning, cost estimation, quality assurance testing, software debugging, software performance optimization, and optimal personnel task assignments.

Limitations

As software development is a complex process, with high variance on both methodologies and objectives, it is difficult to define or measure software qualities and quantities and to determine a valid and concurrent measurement metric, especially when making such a prediction prior to the detail design. Another source of difficulty and debate is in determining which metrics matter, and what they mean.

 The practical utility of software measurements has thus been limited to narrow domains where they include:

• Schedule
• Size/Complexity
• Cost
• Quality

Common goal of measurement may target one or more of the above aspects, or the balance between them as indicator of team’s motivation or project performance.