On October 17 at 7:30 PM, Keith Ciocco will be presenting "Best Practices for Establishing a Successful Estimation Process" at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo. This presentation covers best practices for project estimation. Keith will summarize some key things to remember when setting up a successful estimation process at the organizational and project level, including the importance of calibrating to historical data and measuring size and productivity.

QSM will also be exhibiting at this conference. Stop by booth ET3 and enter to win an iPad 2!

Find more information about the Gartner Symposium ITXpo here and Symposium Session Agenda here.

A replay is now available for the webinar, "Maximizing Value Using the Relationship between Software Size, Productivity, and Reliability," presented by Paul Below.

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 describes 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.

Paul Below has over 25 years' experience in measurement technology, statistical analysis, estimating, forecasting, Lean Six Sigma, and data mining. He serves as a consultant for QSM, providing clients with statistical analysis of operational performance for process improvement and predictability. Mr. Below is a Certified Software Quality Analyst, a past Certified Function Point Specialist, and a Six Sigma Black Belt. He has been a course developer and instructor for Estimating, Lean Six Sigma, Metrics Analysis, Function Point Analysis, as well as statistical analysis in the Masters of Software Engineering program at Seattle University. He has one US patent and two patents pending.

View the webinar replay.

On Thursday, Oct. 6 at 1:00 PM EDT, QSM will host a webinar focused on the relationship and apparent paradox between software size, productivity, and 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 describes 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.

Paul Below has over 25 years' experience in measurement technology, statistical analysis, estimating, forecasting, Lean Six Sigma, and data mining. He serves as a consultant for QSM, providing clients with statistical analysis of operational performance for process improvement and predictability. Mr. Below is a Certified Software Quality Analyst, a past Certified Function Point Specialist, and a Six Sigma Black Belt. He has been a course developer and instructor for Estimating, Lean Six Sigma, Metrics Analysis, Function Point Analysis, as well as statistical analysis in the Masters of Software Engineering program at Seattle University. He has one US patent and two patents pending.

View the replay of this webinar.

We are pleased to announce that QSM has a new SLIM product tour. This online demo shows you how to quickly and easily use SLIM-Estimate to create an estimate validated by industry benchmarks or your own project history. The demo then demonstrates how to negotiate trade-offs and highlights some of the new features of the tool. The product tour also includes SLIM-MasterPlan, which allows you to roll-up multiple estimates and is ideal for iterative and non-iterative developments.

View the new SLIM demo here and tell us what you think!

QSM is pleased to announce we have been rapidly growing this year. To accommodate our new consulting services, training offerings, SLIM tool releases, and research projects, QSM has welcomed a wide range of talented and experienced team members.  Here's a brief overview of our recent additions:

Phil Armour joins the QSM Consulting Team with nearly 40 years of software consulting experience. A longtime SLIM trainer and teaming partner, Phil is also the author of The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software and is contributing editor and author of the column “The Business of Software” in Communications of the ACM.

Another familiar face, Laura Zuber, also recently joined the QSM Consulting Team. Laura has 20 years of experience in software development consulting and training, six of which have been with QSM. Prior to coming to QSM, Laura managed software development projects, and served as a senior software process improvement specialist at SAIC. 

A longtime customer of SLIM at Boeing, John Staiger is a distinguished graduate of the Navy War College and Six Sigma Black Belt with over 30 years of experience in program and project management and statistical analysis. John assists with SLIM Training, as well as consulting and research work.

QSM is pleased to announce the SLIM-Estimate^® Certification Program.  Specifically designed to help our customers ensure the technical excellence of their SLIM users, this program increases the business value of our software project estimation tools to your organization. 

How Certification Is Achieved:

In order to be awarded certification, a user must demonstrate competence in the following areas:

If you missed our webinar, Best in Class SLIM Estimation Processes for Package Implementations, a replay is now available.

To be able to estimate package implementations, we need to be able to size them and support productivity assumptions with relevant data. Presented by Keith Ciocco, this webinar demonstrates package implementation sizing processes and how to calibrate SLIM to package implementation project trends.

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.

On Thursday, June 16 at 1:00 PM EDT, QSM will host a webinar focused on estimating package implementations.

To be able to estimate package implementations, we need to be able to size them and support productivity assumptions with relevant data. Presented by Keith Ciocco, this webinar demonstrates package implementation sizing processes and how to calibrate SLIM software estimation tools to package implementation project trends.

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.

Watch the replay!

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.