On Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:00 PM PM EST, QSM will co-host "Shifting to Agile Methods - The Keys for Long-Term Success" together with Accurev.

Changes to the software development process, such as moving toward Agile methods, must demonstrate sustainable results over time versus just short-term wins.  There are two keys to reaching long-term success that should be considered up front – the new process must be repeatable and measurable. 

In this session, AccuRev’s Chris Lucca and QSM’s Larry Putnam, Jr. will explore these two keys to success.  

This is the second post in a three part investigation of how team size affects project performance, cost, quality, and productivity. Part one looked at cost and schedule performance for Best in Class and Worst in Class IT projects. For this study, Best in Class projects were those that delivered more than one standard deviation faster, but used more than one standard deviation less effort than the industry average for projects of the same size. A key characteristic of these top performing projects was the use of small teams: median team size for best in class projects was 4 FTEs (full time equivalent) people versus 17 FTEs for the worst performers.

What is the relationship between team size and management metrics like cost and defects? To find out, I recently looked at 1060 medium and high confidence IT projects completed between 2005 and 2011. These projects were drawn from the QSM database of over 10,000 completed software projects. The projects were divided into two staffing bins:

• Small team projects (4 or fewer FTE staff)
• Large team projects (5 or more FTE staff)

These size bins bracket the median team size of 4.6 for the overall sample, producing roughly equal groups of projects that cover the same size range. Our best/worst in class study found a 4 to 1 team size ratio between the best and worst performers. 

Last week, Carl Erickson of Atomic Spin referenced a study performed by Doug Putnam several years ago:

A study done by consultancy QSM in 2005 seems to indicate that smaller teams are more efficient than larger teams. Not just a little more efficient, but dramatically more efficient. QSM maintains a database of 4000+ projects. For this study they looked at 564 information systems projects done since 2002. (The author of the study claims their data for real-time embedded systems projects showed similar results.) They divided the data into “small” teams (less than 5 people) and “large” teams (greater than 20 people).

To complete projects of 100,000 equivalent source lines of code (a measure of the size of the project) they found the large teams took 8.92 months, and the small teams took 9.12 months. In other words, the large teams just barely (by a week or so) beat the small teams in finishing the project!

Since then, QSM has performed several studies investigating the relationship between team size and metrics like project scope, productivity, effort/cost, and reliability. The results have been surprisingly consistent regardless of application domain, technology, or year group.  I’ll be reviewing what we found in a series of posts.

We are pleased to announce that QSM has received four "Exceptional" ratings from the Army Contractor Performance Assessment Report (CPAR). A CPAR assessment is based on objective facts and supported by program and contract management data, such as cost performance reports, customer comments, quality reviews, and earned contract incentives. The Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) is the Department of Defense (DoD) Enterprise Solution for collection of contractor Past Performance Information (PPI) as required by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).

Having provided software estimation tools, training and consulting services to the Army since 2004, we very much appreciate their feedback. We try to hire the best people in the business and hold ourselves to a high standard of exceptional performance on all our contracts. These recent CPAR ratings clearly validate the quality of our staff.

Read the full press release.

Paul Below will be presenting "Optimal Project Performance: Factors that Influence Project Duration" at the 2012 Better Software West Conference on Thursday, June 14 at 4:00 PM.

Speedy delivery is almost always a primary project goal or a significant project constraint. To shorten project duration without sacrificing quality or budget, you need to know where to focus the team’s efforts. Mining the QSM database containing many quantitative metrics and numerous qualitative attributes, Paul Bellow shares the factors that have the greatest influence on project duration. While he’s at it, Paul debunks a couple of myths. For example, many managers consider team skill to be important in determining duration of software projects—not so. The most important factors are certain types of tooling, architecture, testing efficiency, and management/leadership skills, which Paul explores in depth. Learn a technique for normalizing your projects for size by computing the standardized residual of duration. Leave with new facts and data on how to improve your development skills and practices to increase velocity and keep the quality your customers expect.

We are pleased to announce that the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Cost and Economics (ODASA-CE) has contracted QSM to provide a comprehensive cost methodology, which includes tools, consulting support, and on-site training. This contract is a continuation of a successful working relationship between QSM and the Army that began in 2004. With the new contract, QSM will be providing estimation assistance on major ACAT 1 programs (major acquisition programs).  QSM will also help establish a metrics database with software data from the Defense and Cost Research Center (DCARC) and from DASA-CE data collection efforts. This database will be used for program analysis and evaluation. 

Read the full press release here.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

-  Albert Einstein

How’s your software measurement program doing?  Is it well funded and supported by management, or do you worry about your job the next time the organization decides it needs to be “leaner and meaner”?  Many measurement programs are cancelled or fade into meaningless obscurity.  Why?  Some things are out of your control; but here are a few that will improve your odds for success:

We’ve all heard the cliché, "Work smarter not harder."  In an article he wrote for ACM’s Communications magazine, Phil Armour wonders, “If we were smart enough to do that, wouldn’t we already be doing it?” Sometimes we simply don’t know how to work smarter.  But sometimes we don’t work smarter because we choose ... or are not allowed to do things right the first time. 

Abraham Lincoln said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”  Sharpening our axe requires several things:

Software is everywhere in modern life - from automobiles, airplanes, utilities, banks, to complex systems and global communications networks. They run the gamut from tiny applets that comprise just a handful of instructions to giant systems running millions of lines of code that take years to build.

Software professionals are at the front lines of this information revolution.  This post addresses Frequently Asked Questions about measuring the size of software applications after they’re finished and estimating the work for a project that has yet to be started. We hope it will help software professionals do a better job of describing what they are building for their companies as software continues to grow in strategic importance to our companies and to our daily lives.

Question:  What do we mean by the term, “Software Size”

Answer:  For starters, think of T-shirts – Small, Medium, Large, or Extra-Large, or houses that can range from a small summer cottage all the way up to a 20,000 sq ft Hollywood mansion on a sprawling estate.

So it goes with software. You can have a small program with a few cool features, or a huge, complex computerized trading system for the New York Stock Exchange comprised of millions of lines of code, and everything in-between.

Question:  I have a large project and its size is 20 people. Is that what you mean?

Answer:  Not quite. That’s actually the number of the people on your team, or number of staff resources on the project.  It’s not the amount of functionality, or the volume of software created by a team of that size. 

Question:  Ok, so you’re saying that small feature sets for a software program - or a long list of features - is what you mean by the size of the software. Do you also mean lines of code?

QSM has been collaborating with Forrester Research on a report focused on the current state of Agile development. Prior Forrester data shows an adoption rate of about 38% among developers in 2010 and continuous growth YoY in the last three years. However few have really scaled it to the enterprise level. Have you?

To get a better data representation, we encourage to participate in this survey. Tell us about your current and future Agile development plans. This survey will ask questions like: 

• What are the expected and achieved benefits of Agile?
• How is Agile being adopted?
• What is Agile actually improving in organizations and how are results being measured?
• Which Agile practices are the most commonly used? 

To participate in this survey, click here.

More Agile resources from QSM:

• Estimating Agile Projects Webinar 
• Beyond the Hype: Thoughts on Agile Development