Performance measures for supporting project manager decisions

Software measurement is a crucial technology along the software development process, and notably for project management. Decision making in project management requires in fact accurate estimations and metrics support to monitor and control the varying factors affecting the development process. In particular, managers must make reliable schedule predictions and optimize personnel utilization. They thus must be able to dynamically evaluate whether the resources assigned to a job are sufficient and whether the organization structure is adequate to meet the scheduled deadlines. To support managers in these tasks, we propose a method called Propean (for PROject PErformance ANalysis) based on the combination of classical performance engineering techniques and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The combined application of these disciplines guarantees from one side a validated approach for modelling and estimating the