In this article originally published on Agile Connection, QSM's Larry Putnam, Jr. turns to cold hard data from completed projects in the QSM database to determine whether big agile is "enterprise savior or oxymoron."
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".
“The only way to increase product quality and reduce cost while concurrently improving product development speed is to fundamentally change the development process itself.”
Christopher Meyer 1
“Information development must be spearheaded by a general, not coordinated by aides-de-camp.”
Peter G. W. Keen 1981 1
This article discusses how, in software development, metrics can provide managers some assurance that the development can be conducted within bounds of cost, schedule, and reliability.