Users should have the ability to define a new derived or composite metric by applying some of the selection criteria or composition operators to one or more existing metrics.
They should also have the ability to save all current metric definitions to a file, producing a metric definition record. This should not be confused with a measurement archive, which records the results of measures resulting from applying certain metrics to certain projects.
Although the concepts are distinct, EiffelStudio lets you store a measurement archive and the corresponding metric definition record into a single file, so that when you access the archived measures you have an unambiguous definition of the metrics that served to produce them.
The environment must also provide a way of adding a set of metrics read from a metric definition record, available from a local file, to the current metric definitions. As a result, users will be able to benefit from each other's metric definitions and improve them over time.