UNCORRECTED PROOF 2 Measures for mobile users: an architecture 3 Alberto Sillitti a, * , Andrea Janes b , Giancarlo Succi b , Tullio Vernazza a 4 a Department of Communication, Computer and System Sciences, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 13, I-16145 Genova, Italy 5 b Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen, Piazza Domenicani 3, I-39000 Bolzano, Italy 6 Received 20 March 2003; received in revised form 18 August 2003; accepted 8 September 2003 7 Abstract 8 Software measures are important to evaluate software properties like complexity, reusability, maintainability, effort 9 required, etc. Collecting such data is difficult because of the lack of tools that perform acquisition automatically. It is 10 not possible to implement a manual data collection because it is error prone and very time expensive. Moreover, de- 11 velopers often work in teams and sometimes in different places using laptops. These conditions require tools that collect 12 data automatically, can work offline and merge data from different developers working in the same project. This paper 13 presents PROM (PRO Metrics), a distributed Java based tool designed to collect automatically software measures. This 14 tool uses a distributed architecture based on plug-ins, integrated in most popular development tools, and the SOAP 15 communication protocol. 16 Ó 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V. 17 Keywords: Development monitoring; Process metrics; Product metrics; Java 18 1. Introduction 19 It is difficult to extract measures from both 20 software [7] and software development process [11] 21 due to a shortage of focused tools that perform 22 such tasks automatically. In particular, tracking 23 the entire development process manually is time 24 expensive and error prone [5,14]. Moreover, these 25 errors are more frequent when a reliable tracking 26 is more important to understand if and how the 27 process should be improved. For example, that 28 happens when developers are under pressure be- 29 cause of an approaching deadline. 30 Metrics data are important to find out the 31 correlation between objective measurable data and 32 software qualities like complexity, reusability, cost 33 of maintenance, effort required, etc. 34 A completely automated tool that performs 35 such data acquisition without any effort by devel- 36 opers should help both developers and managers 37 to improve software quality and shipping times. 38 The system has to take care of developersÕ privacy 39 allowing managers and colleagues to access only 40 aggregated data at different levels. 41 Collected data can help managers to implement 42 a popular accounting technique called activity- 43 base costing (ABC) [3]. Usually, this technique is * Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-010-3532173; fax: +39- 010-3532154. E-mail addresses: alberto@dist.unige.it (A. Sillitti), an- drea.janes@unibz.it (A. Janes), giancarlo.succi@unibz.it (G. Succi), tullio@dist.unige.it (T. Vernazza). 1383-7621/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.sysarc.2003.09.005 Journal of Systems Architecture xxx (2003) xxx–xxx www.elsevier.com/locate/sysarc SYSARC 546 No. of Pages 13, DTD = 4.3.1 4 November 2003 Disk used ARTICLE IN PRESS