You can track metrics for top-level configuration management projects and calculate them through event triggers. Calculated metrics can be viewed for a configuration management project or through a computed field on a workflow and document project item. Metrics provide information on a project as of a specific checkpoint.

PTC RV&S provides some standard physical metrics you can use. You can also create your own metrics using a third party tool.

PTC RV&S provides the following metrics:

These metrics are calculated by the following event triggers:

Metric calculations generated by operations in subprojects are automatically rolled up to the parent project.

If you decide to track metrics for a project that has already been checkpointed, you can calculate metrics for existing checkpoints using the Calculate Project Metrics command in the GUI or the sicalculateprojectmetrics command in the CLI.

You can view the calculated metrics for a project in the Project Metrics view or through the siviewmetricsinfo CLI command.

You can also view calculated metrics in the workflow and document project item that is associated with the configuration management project. The workflow and document project item must have an si project data type field that links it to the configuration management project and a computed field that displays the metric calculations that you want to view. For example, if you want to see the number of members in an configuration management project in the corresponding workflow and document project item, you would create a Number of Members field with the following expression:

You could checkpoint the configuration management project nightly and update the build revision encoded in the si project field; so any changes in the number of members would be reflected in the workflow and document project item.

You can use a third party tool to track additional configuration management metrics. Metrics tracked by a third party tool must be defined in PTC RV&S and recorded for a specific project checkpoint. You define a metric by specifying a name and description for it using the sicreatemetricinfo CLI command. To define a metric you need the Metrics permission.

You can use a third party tool to calculate metrics for Java. For example, you can use a tool such as JavaNCSS¹ to calculate the number of Java source files in a project. You need to write a script to add the metrics calculated by a third party tool to a specific project checkpoint. For more information on creating a script for metrics, see the comments in the sample script metrics.js. You can update this file by adding your file suffix to one of the tables and creating a new JavaScript function to implement the metrics.

You can use a third party tool to calculate metrics for C or C++ in the context of a Sandbox. You add the calculated value of the metric to a project checkpoint using the siaddprojectmetric CLI command. For more information on the CLI commands see the CLI man pages.

There may be a performance impact when using project metrics. The first time you checkpoint a project with a large number of members that existed before implementing metrics, the metric calculation may take a significant amount of time. The increase in time is due to the need for the metrics to be initially computed for the pre-existing members, while subsequent metric calculations are aggregated for members of the project.