Communication metrics for software development

We present empirical evidence that metrics on communication artifacts generated by groupware tools can be used to gain significant insight into the development process that produced them. We describe a testbed for developing and testing communication metrics, a senior level software engineering project course at Carnegie Mellon University, in which we conducted several studies and experiments from 1991 to 1996 with more than 300 participants. Such a testbed is an ideal environment for empirical software engineering, providing sufficient realism while allowing for controlled observation of important project parameters. We illustrate the value of communication metrics with three proof-of-concept experiments and propose a statistical framework based on structural equations for validating communication metrics.