Base lining refers to a metrics system in which the present performance of the organization is compared with historical metric or “baseline”. Baseline represents the organization’s performance in terms of schedule, effort involved and the defects.
The Base lining method can be used in the following scenarios
- Start of the project: For estimating the project effort and for planning reviews and testing.
- During the project: To determine whether a corrective measure is required.
- End of the project: To identify if the project was doing something good which should be institutionalized, and to identify whether the project was missing something which should be done on a similar project in future.
Usually there are three general steps in developing a baseline which are –
- Identifying the sources of baseline data
- Collecting the data
- Analyzing the data