Importance of metrics in software development life cycle

Software engineering is the discipline which paves the roadmap for the development of software within given schedule and effort and with the desired quality. Software metrics plays an important role in measuring attributes that are critical to the success of a software project. Measurement of these attributes helps to make the characteristics and relationships between the attribute. The field of software engineering is affected by infrequent, incomplete and inconsistent measurements. Metrics are gaining importance and acceptance as organization mature and strive to improve software quality. Although many metrics have been proposed by researchers, they are either ignored or used in isolation. The aim of this paper is to investigate the metric support for different phases of Software Development Life ycle (SDLC). This study envisages a survey which includes a small set of the most well known and commonly applied traditional software metrics which could apply to software development life cycle. The study also comprises of an extensive literature study and follows a methodical approach consisting of two steps i.e, analyzing key phases in software development life cycle and identifies the attributes of software design and testing processes include metric support for each of the identified attributes.