The new look and feel of the default workbooks in SLIM Suite are based around infographic and dashboard design principles.  Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few served as an excellent resource for updating the views and color schemes in SLIM Suite 8.2.  Our goal in updating the look and feel of SLIM-Suite 8.2 was to highlight the pertinent inputs and outputs in bright, bold colors and to allow other view elements like gridlines or historic data to fade into the background by using more muted colors, allowing you to focus on the important metrics when making key management decisions. 

New views in SLIM-Estimate

As you step through the default workbook in SLIM-Estimate, you'll notice that the default folders and view names have changed.  Views have been reorganized into folders with descriptive, functional names to make it easier to find the right views, charts, and reports and give users a more effective dashboard for evaluating solutions, adjusting them and reviewing logged solutions.

SLIM Suite 8.2 comes with four themes to choose from, plus two placeholders for your own custom themes.

White Background (Default)

We know agile works well for small teams and small projects, but monster enterprise projects often require greater capabilities than a small team can provide. So why not scale up agile teams to maintain the cost and efficiency benefits of the agile process while accessing the necessary manpower to pursue complex global projects? On the surface, it makes sense, but what if agile only works when teams and projects stay relatively small? That's the question most CIOs want answered before investing scarce time, energy, or resources chasing the big agile paradigm. In this article recently 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."

Read the full article!

The problems of software projects are concentrated in three areas: schedule, cost, and quality.  These problems have accompanied software development from the beginning, so they are not new.  Nor have they been ignored.  Huge amounts of thought and effort have been focused on them with unfortunately modest results.  Improvement efforts have been concentrated on management technique (think PMO), process improvement (CMMI, for example), and better tools.  These are all good things, and I can’t imagine embarking on a development activity of any magnitude without them.  However, they have not significantly reduced the incidence of schedule, budget, and quality problems.  Since the problems remain, obviously these remedies have not effectively addressed the root causes of schedule and cost overruns and poor quality.

After enduring the longest winter I can remember, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of spring, and what better way to do that than to participate in QSM’s annual March Madness Tournament?  For those of you not familiar with our March Madness pool, it’s kind of a big deal.  The top finisher receives a portion of the winnings as well as bragging rights for the following year, and in the process gains immunity from being subject to ridicule by our Commish.  This year the steaks are especially high, as Warren Buffet has offered $1 billion to the person who can guess the perfect bracket.

I will admit that while my standings in last year’s tournament were not as high as I had hoped, I am determined to turn that around this year.  I’ve abandoned my mascot battle strategy and instead will be implementing some techniques used by some of the best software estimators in the field.  I will be using history to determine my picks.  

Instead of spending a lot of time laboriously filling in each line, I had Yahoo Sports auto-fill my bracket based on the teams’ historical standings this season.  To come up with my final score, I averaged the scores of the previous 10 national championship games.  It pains me to predict that some of my favorite teams will be eliminated in the second and third rounds in this bracket, but in the interest of becoming a self-made billionaire I cannot afford to make any emotionally-driven decisions that ignore the stats. 

I think it’s safe to say that nobody really enjoys hearing bad news.  It’s especially hard if you’re the person who has to deliver the bad news, particularly to a superior.  How will your boss react?  Will you be the one held responsible (unfairly) for the project failure?  These are all reasons for keeping the ‘bad news’ to yourself and letting those in charge find out on their own.  

I’ll share a story about one of the first jobs I ever held, as an assistant manager at a summer swimming pool.  My supervisor had a very hands-off approach to management and would often rely on me and the other assistant managers to handle the day-to-day operations of the pool.  Whenever I would deliver less-than-favorable news to him, such as our pool vacuum breaking, or a health inspector dropping by to schedule a visit, my supervisor would literally stick his fingers in his ears and say “La la la la la, I can’t hear you.  Taylor, you know how I feel about bad news.  Fix the problem.”  This put me in a very awkward situation, because as a high school student, I didn’t necessarily have the training or the authority to fix every problem myself, in order to shield him from the ‘bad news.’  

Unfortunately, this type of management exists beyond the pool house and can frequently be found in the corporate world as well.  In an environment where your reputation can mean everything, stakeholders can be very reluctant to receive bad news about the status of their project.  The silver lining in this is that receiving ‘bad news’ isn’t necessarily always a bad thing.  Allow me to explain.

Dear Carol:

As a project manager who is new to formal project estimating, I’ve been hearing about the importance of having project histories available for accurate estimating.  We just purchased SLIM-Estimate but we don’t have any project history.  Can we still use SLIM, and how many projects do we need before we can get accurate estimates?

– PM in Atlanta

Dear PM:

You may have heard that “history repeats itself” and the adage is true in software development.  Completed projects where the actual software size, effort hours, duration and cost are often the best predictors of future performance on projects – and your own project history gives accurate indicators of how your corporation performs.  However, the majority of QSM clients who purchase SLIM-Estimate start out with little or none of their own project history.  The good news is that the SLIM tool comes preloaded with productivity, duration, staffing, and effort hours trend lines based on thousands of completed real life projects, and delineated by industry and type of project.  When you do an estimate using SLIM, the Monte Carlo simulation models are run, and the results are compared against trend line graphs so that you can see how your estimate of effort, duration, staffing and cost compare to the chosen industry.  This gives you the confidence to know where your estimate falls against comparable completed projects (of a given size.) If your estimates fall outside the bounds of a single standard deviation above or below the industry trend lines, you know that you may want to reassess the assumptions of your estimate.

Dear Carol: 

I work in IT and we do a lot of our software development projects based on pre-defined delivery dates (no one really knows where they come from).  Sometimes this works out, but usually we end up delivering the project months late because we had no idea the project was as big or as complex as anyone had originally thought. A friend says his company uses “t-shirt sizing” for software project estimates and I’ve never heard of it. What can you tell me about this new approach?

- I’m willing to learn from the fashion industry 

Dear I’m willing:

T-shirt sizing has been around in one form or another for a few years but it is not a widespread mainstream estimating method.  It is a quick and dirty way to estimate software size using ranges of size.  Once you have the relative size (e.g., XS, Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL, or larger), you can enter it into several different estimating tools as the size on which to base the estimate. While this doesn’t give you a guaranteed size for the software to be delivered, it is better than not having any idea of the size.  Size (scope) is one of the three main tenets of the triple constraints (scope, budget and schedule) for project management.  Given one, you can estimate the other two.

Sometimes business life follows literature. Recently, I came across the following quote and I had to pause:

“Before we build a better mousetrap, we need to find
out if there are any mice out there.” - Yogi Berra

It reminded me of a conversation I had over lunch 15 years ago, when I was president of the International Function Point Users Group (IFPUG) and Charles Symons was president of the UK Software Metrics Association (UKSMA), where we were talking about the future of software sizing.  IFPUG is the inventor of the original method to size software using a measure called “Function Points.”  Charles is the creator of a similar UK method called Mark II function points and a co-creator of the Common Software Metrics International Consortium (COSMIC) sizing method that was, at the time, still in its infancy.  I’m paraphrasing with the words but I believe it captures the content of our conversation:

“The problem with function points,” Charles remarked, “is that they aren’t yet perfect enough.  What we need is a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to our door.”

I disagreed saying “I don’t think that’s the problem at all – I think the problem is that world doesn’t yet see mice as a problem.”

Can advances in data-driven estimation turn software project failure into a distant memory? Well, if learning from experience is the key to success, imagine what you could do with real-time access to three decades of research, thousands of projects and more than 600 industry trends. In this article, originally published on Projects at Work, QSM's Larry Putnam, Jr. identifies key benefits of employing estimation best practices for project success.

As Co-CEO for QSM, Larry Putnam, Jr.'s has more than 25 years of experience in software measurement, estimating and project control. He joined QSM in 1987 and has worked in every aspect of the business, including business development, customer support, professional services and now executive management.

Read the full article!