MCLEAN, Virginia – QSM, Inc., a leader in software and systems development estimation, planning, and project management, today announced that they have upgraded their integration of SLIM-Control to support IBM Rational Team Concert V3.0.1.

Rational Team Concert provides a unique team collaborative development environment enabling productivity and quality in modern software development. Project data in Team Concert, such as Work Items (stories planned; stories completed) and Quality (defects found; defects corrected) can be retrieved by QSM’s SLIM-Control to perform its project analysis:

• Variance analysis assesses project health and progress
• Adaptive forecasts-to-complete based on progress metrics indicated

“With SLIM-Control, our goal is to help our clients track their projects to their estimates and allow them to adapt as necessary,” says Larry Putnam, Jr., Co-CEO of QSM. “This integration allows users to bring their project data in RTC into SLIM-Control so they can quickly and easily forecast alternatives.”

“QSM’s offering, with its proven track record,” said Michael Loria, Vice President of IBM Rational Business Development, “operating on real project data in Rational Team Concert, can help our clients negotiate achievable goals, set realistic expectations and communicate more effectively with colleagues and customers in an increasingly collaborative fashion.”

As our clients expand into new design disciplines, QSM recognizes their need for estimation, tracking, and benchmarking tools for domains outside of just software. Our goal with SLIM 8.0 has been to increase configurability within our tools so our clients can model any type of system quickly and easily. With SLIM Suite 8.0g2, QSM continues to expand our offerings to support different design processes and increase ease of use.

SLIM Suite.  An auto-update notification feature has been added to detect when a newer version of the SLIM Suite exists and is available for download. Enhancements have also been added so Export to PowerPoint now defaults to .pptx file format and Export to Word now defaults to .docx file format where appropriate.

SLIM-Estimate. An "Update My Project Milestones" button has been added to the WBS tab of the Work Breakdown Structure dialog box to give clients the option to replace existing project milestones defined on the Milestones tab of the Project Environment dialog box with milestones defined in the WBS. Two new SEW templates, "Call Center" and "Data Center," have been added, leveraging new Infrastructure trends.

SLIM-Metrics. A new feature has been added to File | Import Workbook Components > Reference Data tab, which allows clients to import a specific reference group (as opposed to importing all reference groups in the source workbook).

If you are a current SLIM Suite client and would like to get the latest upgrade, please contact QSM Support.

If you were unable to attend "An Introduction to the SLIM Suite of Tools," originally presented on April 28 by Keith Ciocco, a replay is now available for viewing.

Want to learn more about our tools? This webinar will give you an introduction to the SLIM Suite, as well as highlight some of the new features for users that are already familiar with SLIM. QSM Vice President Keith Ciocco shows you how to sanity-check your estimates with industry data, provide what-if analysis, and negotiate estimates with clients or management. Get a full overview of the SLIM-Suite, including SLIM-Estimate, SLIM-Control, SLIM-Metrics, SLIM-MasterPlan, and SLIM-DataManager.

As Vice President of QSM, Keith has more than 23 years of experience working in sales and customer service, with 15 of those years spent at QSM. Keith’s primary responsibilities include managing business development, existing client relations, customer retention and response.

View the replay here.

QSM  invites developers of financial services and Business/IT applications to participate in their 2011 IT Maintenance and Offshoring Survey. Software development organizations are always curious about how they stack up against the industry. With your help, we hope to provide insight into how major software developers budget, staff, and measure their maintenance and offshore development. Key analysis areas include:

• How much do IT shops typically spend on application maintenance vs. new development/enhancements?
• What project types and skills are most likely to be offshored?
• How does offshore development stack up in terms of productivity and quality?
• What are the challenges and constraints of the offshore development environment?

At the conclusion of the survey, participants will receive an electronic copy of the QSM IT Almanac and a free industry summary report that analyzes typical development vs. maintenance budgets and offshore spending and resource mixes by software function, platform, and skill.

Who should complete the survey?
This survey is primarily focused on major financial services software firms, but IT systems developers are also welcome to participate.

Survey Timeline
The survey will begin Monday, April 18th and close on Friday, April 29th, 2011.

On Thursday, April 28 at 1:00 PM EDT, QSM will host a webinar showcasing features of the SLIM Suite of Tools.

Want to learn more about our tools? This webinar will give you an introduction to the SLIM Suite, as well as highlight some of the new features for users that are already familiar with SLIM. QSM Vice President Keith Ciocco shows you how to sanity-check your estimates with industry data, provide what-if analysis, and negotiate estimates with clients or management. Get a full overview of the SLIM-Suite, including SLIM-Estimate, SLIM-Control, SLIM-Metrics, SLIM-MasterPlan, and SLIM-DataManager.

As Vice President of QSM, Keith has more than 23 years of experience working in sales and customer service, with 15 of those years spent at QSM. Keith’s primary responsibilities include managing business development, existing client relations, customer retention and response.

To register, click here.

Two common questions we receive are “how quickly can we get SLIM deployed within our organization?” and “how accurate will our estimates be?” On the accuracy question, our answer is usually that “it depends”. Like most things, accuracy and success in estimating are directly correlated to the effort put into the task. If you buy a commercial estimating tool and try to use it “out of the box” with no tailoring and calibration, accuracy usually suffers. One of the most efficient ways to achieve both of these goals is to use your own historical data. This was an excellent example of how one of our global systems integration clients was able to get almost immediate value by calibrating SLIM-Estimate to their historical data.

This major integrator wanted to improve estimation at one of their accounts, a large multinational company.  In addition they wanted to use function points as their sizing metric. After evaluating a number of estimation options, including custom built and other internally developed solutions, they decided to use QSM’s SLIM-Estimate, which was being deployed globally across the rest of the organization. They decided to start with a pilot implementation. The estimation pilot lasted a total of 5 months with a staff of 2 people. After the fact they looked at the effort expended on their pilot activities and found that 60% of the total effort went into their calibration activities. The calibration  process included assembling a historical data sample of over 50 projects. As part of their function point deployment, they empirically determined FP/ESLOC gearing factors.

In recent years, we have seen our client base become increasingly diverse, expressing the need for our estimation, tracking, and benchmarking tools for design processes outside of just software. While clients have customized SLIM to other design disciplines in the past, our goal with SLIM 8.0 was to increase configurability within our tools so our users can model any type of system quickly and easily. Now users can forecast and benchmark Agile, infrastructure, offshore/multi-shore, ERP/package implementation projects, and more.  In addition to updated trendlines from 10,000 completed software and systems projects, SLIM comes pre-packaged with trend groups, such as Agile, ERP, Financial, Web, and Government.

Read the full press release with detailed product upgrades here.

Last week we looked at IT software productivity trends for 1000 completed IT systems and noted that average productivity has declined over the last 15 years.

The post sparked some interesting responses. Two readers wanted to know whether productivity actually increases over time for projects in the same size range? If so, this would be an illustration of Simpson's Paradox: a counterintuitive phenomenon we've seen from time to time in our own research. Simply put, sometimes the direction of a trend is reversed when the sample is broken into categories.

To answer their question, I used our SLIM-Metrics tool to stratify the sample into four size bins:

Under 5000 Effective (new + modified) SLOC
5000- <10000 Effective (new + modified) SLOC
10000-<20000 Effective (new + modified) SLOC
20000-<30000 Effective (new + modified) SLOC

These 4 size bins span a little over two thirds of the data. As a sanity check, I applied the same queries to both the original sample of 1000 IT projects and a larger sample of nearly 2200 IT projects. As the following chart shows, stratifying the data into size bins doesn't affect the overall direction of the trend:

For conventional productivity (FP/Person Month) the decline in productivity was even more pronounced:

Here are the results as of 3 pm today for our productivity poll. I was surprised to see that "Time slicing and multi-tasking" was far and away the most popular response!

When I framed the poll question, I was thinking of time slicing by policy (i.e., where management asks a single person to divide his time/attention between multiple projects). Viewed from a cost perspective, such assignments make perfect cents [pun fully intended] - especially for small or poorly capitalized projects. But from a productivity perspective, the constant distractions inherent in this kind of multi-tasking can result in less than optimal performance. 

Carol Dekkers made me think of another possible explanation for the declining productivity we've seen over the last 15 years: the distraction of 24/7 online communication. 

Since joining the world of social media I realize my “connectivity” has grown exponentially, but not all in a good way. Even with my SPAM filters set to high, I get so much email that it is overwhelming!

 I feel like I must have ADD (attention deficit disorder) because my day is interruption after interruption (sorry TweetDeck!) and I need help (and I know I am not the only one!)

If you're planning on attending this year's SEPG conference, don't miss QSM Consultant, researcher, and all around blogger extraordinaire Paul Below! On Wednesday, March 23rd, Paul will demonstrate how organizations can Maximize Value by Understanding the Productivity Paradox and Predicting Reliability:

Now more than ever, software projects need to efficiently deliver reliable software. However, many development plans unintentionally guarantee a less-than-optimal result. This presentation uses historical result metrics to describe how to maximize value by establishing minimum acceptable reliability and how to take advantage of the apparent paradox between software size and productivity through appropriate selection of team size and schedule duration.

If you've enjoyed Paul's posts here, make sure you stop by and say hello!