The “Secret Sauce” in SLIM-Estimate
For over 20 years I’ve been an advocate of using metrics for improving IT processes. Shortly into my career as a COBOL developer, I was introduced to Function Point Analysis; and ever since it’s been the most powerful tool in my toolkit. After all: size matters! Once I learned to quantify the amount of functionality delivered by a project or an application, I could zoom in on cost, effort, duration, productivity, and quality because I now had a normalization factor to perform comparisons (Cost per Function Point, Hours per Function Point, Defects per Function Point, etc.).
Shortly after getting my Certified Function Point Specialist certification, I became obsessed with the different measures and metrics pertaining to software and IT. Soon I became a Certified Software Measurement Specialist, where I learned everything there was to know about how to measure everything there was to measure in software (or so I thought). It’s a pretty powerful feeling being able to help organizations baseline their current capabilities so they could determine if implementing the latest and greatest silver bullet was really going to give them the gains in productivity they had been striving for.