In the manufacturing industry, there has been a significant increase in the use of coordinate measuring machines(CMM). In this paper, the sources of CMM measurement performance are discussed. The effects of workpiece position, length and orientation are analyzed by using the design of experiments. Both a fractional factorial design and a factorial design are employed to conduct the experimental study. The analysis of variance is performed to determine the significance of factors in the experiment and regression analysis is applied to make the measurement approximate model. The results show that position along the Z axis, length and orientation affect the CMM measurement performance.