Our new video series, Software Size Matters! Why Quantifying Software Size is Critical for Project Estimating, Tracking, and Performance Benchmarking, explores how you not only can but should be using software size measures at every stage of the software project, program, or portfolio management process. We created this video series to help you improve the accuracy of your software estimates, plans and forecasts because software size matters.
The core management metrics used for software estimation and software project management - schedule (duration), effort (cost), quality (defects) and developer productivity - all increase with software size (scope). This may not surprise you. But did you know that they increase in a nonlinear fashion? This is why estimating and managing software projects is challenging!
How good are your software project estimates compared to the actual time and money spent when the project's completed? If you want to improve your software estimation accuracy, this video series is for you!
Watch Episode 1: Introduction
Quantifying software size helps you with:
- Software project estimating, producing early scope based ROM estimates to support feasibility assessments in the initiation and planning stages, and detailed software estimates to support project commitments as the scope is better understood.
- Tracking the status of in-flight software projects and forecasting estimates to complete based on actual software size.
- Capturing completed project data at closeout to expand and refine data analytics and provide a basis of estimation of future projects.
- Performance benchmarking to support software process improvement initiatives and establish competitive positions.
In this video series, we'll dive into:
- Specific examples that demonstrate why quantifying software size is critical.
- Define software sizing terms and metrics.
- Choosing a software sizing method that fits your technology, development methods, and available data.
- Selecting software size function units like epics, user stories, interfaces, data conversions, and source lines of code, just to mention a few.
- How software sizing is applied throughout the project lifecycle.
- Benchmarking and estimate validation - how to sanity check estimates against your actual productivity schedule and effort data.