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.
Employing a top-down estimation approach to project management can help organizations overcome boundaries and satisfy the three V’s of corporate success – vision, value, and velocity. This article, originally published in ISV Insights, takes a closer look at how this approach can work for software companies, particularly larger organizations, to help them improve project management, team collaboration, and development practices.
The Agile Round Table participants had several questions about measuring effort and productivity, and whether there are special issues around how to define and collect these metrics in an agile environment. In this article, Andy Berner identifies best practices for measuring effort and productivity in agile and discusses how the two are related.
Industry expert Phillip G. Armour highlights the importance of the QSM Software Almanac: 2014 Research Edition in his recent article for Communications of the ACM.
In a recent article for Projects at Work, QSM's Don Beckett identifies seven principles, based on comprehensive studies, that leaders must support and uphold to help create an environment in which projects can succeed. Ignoring them practically guarantees failure.
This study looks at the QSM software project database and examines a set of validated projects counted in function points that have completed since the year 2000 to see what they tell about productivity, schedule, and staffing.
How many people should I use on my development team?
What actions can I take that will have an immediate and lasting positive impact on my development project(s)?
There are also some strategic (longer term) capital investments we can make and some process improvement policies we can adopt that will have a large impact on reducing cycle time, cutting costs, and increasing quality on future projects. The benefits of these actions can be quantified through the notion of process productivity.
What will happen to your date-dependent software when the year rolls from 1999 to 2000?
There is no doubt that the millennium date change problem is huge. Thus according to Gartner Group’s strategic planning assumptions:
This article discusses the trade-off of a little more development time for a lot less effort, cost and defects in the context of the perceived need for "more software now".