When a project goes over schedule, costs too much money, or doesn’t deliver the desired functionality, business leaders may wonder what could have been done differently. Ask a professional estimator. Often, these are the people holding the crystal ball - those charged with planning and assessing the project before it even gets off the ground. We recently polled our own seasoned estimation experts at QSM to find out their thoughts.

Leveraging QSM's industry database of over 13,000+ completed projects, Katie Costantini takes a high-level look at changes to software schedules, effort/cost, productivity, size, and reliability metrics from 1980 to 2019.

In this article for GCN, Doug Putnam takes a look at some of the common pitfalls that lead to project cost and schedule overruns and how parametric estimation can help government CIOs and their teams avoid these traps.

A recent initiative put forth by the DoD was to improve its estimation process by leveraging historical data collected from forensic analyses of recently completed software development efforts. This article by Taylor Putnam-Majarian and John Staiger, discusses (1) some of the challenges faced throughout this initiative, (2) the data collection process, and (3) how one can leverage data to improve cost estimates. This article was originally published in Crosstalk Magazine.

Fred Brooks’ observation that nine women can’t make a baby in one month is perhaps the earliest and best known analogy between software development and parenting, and it’s an apt one. An effective software measurement program — like good parenting — requires careful planning, regular monitoring, and a significant long-term investment of time and energy.