QSM recently published the seventh and final article in the QSM Agile Round Table series. The QSM Agile Round Table was formed to discuss the role of estimation in agile environments. QSM customers shared their questions, challenges, and experiences on the relevance and benefits of scope-based estimation in an agile environment. Participants had several questions about measuring effort and productivity, and whether there are special issues around how to define and collect these metrics in an agile environment. In this article, Andy Berner identifies best practices for measuring effort and productivity in agile and discusses how the two are related.

Read the article!

QSM recently published the sixth article in the QSM Agile Round Table series. The QSM Agile Round Table was formed to discuss the role of estimation in agile environments. QSM customers shared their questions, challenges, and experiences on the relevance and benefits of scope-based estimation in an agile environment. The previous two articles focused on determining size in a consistent enough manner across multiple products, projects, and agile teams in order to have good historical data on which to base an estimate. They looked at several possible units of measure for software size, including story points, function points, and source lines of code (SLOC). SLIM-Estimate and SLIM-Collaborate permit any of those units, as well as others, to be used for software sizing. In order to use a sizing unit other than SLOC in the SLIM tools, you must assign a gearing factor.  For function points, gearing factors are discussed here. In this article, QSM's Andy Berner addresses ways of choosing a gearing factor for story points.

Read the article!

QSM recently published the fifth article in the QSM Agile Round Table series.  The QSM Agile Round Table was formed to discuss the role of estimation in agile environments.  QSM customers shared their questions, challenges, and experiences on the relevance and benefits of scope-based estimation in an agile environment. This article continues the focus from the previous article on determining size in a consistent enough manner across multiple products, projects, and agile teams so that you have good historical data on which to base an estimate. QSM's Andy Berner looks at other sizing units besides story points, in particular function points and source lines of code. 

Read the full article!

QSM is pleased to share the fourth article in the QSM Agile Round Table series.  The QSM Agile Round Table was formed to discuss the role of estimation in agile environments.  QSM customers shared their questions, challenges, and experiences on the relevance and benefits of scope-based estimation in an agile environment. The previous article in this series, “Big Rock Estimation” written by Aaron Jeutter from Rockwell Automation, addressed the question of how to determine the size of a release absent of a “big upfront requirements phase”, and thus when the requirements are only known at a very high level and subject to refinement and change.  The next three articles written by Andy Berner will focus on determining size in a consistent enough manner across multiple products, projects, and agile teams so that you have good historical data on which to base an estimate. They will also show how to apply these techniques with the SLIM Suite of products.

Read the full article!

Executive teams and your end clients always want to know, “how good are our development teams?”  Agile development teams usually promise that they can deliver faster and cheaper with better quality.  But how do you truly know this is the case?  The only way to really know is to apply quantitative measurement to agile.  With the SLIM solution you can look at a completed agile project and determine the productivity that was demonstrated.  This productivity metric encompasses all environmental factors, such as how good is the skill level and experience of your development team?  How good are the tools and methodology in place?  What is the technical complexity of the software you are building? 

This post was originally published on Linkedin. Join the QSM Linkedin Group and Company Page to stay up-to-date with more content like this.

QSM recently announced a major update to the QSM Software Project Database, a large and robust body of data that helps software and IT professionals estimate the cost, time and effort requirements for their software and systems projects. As a result, QSM clients and SLIM Suite users can benefit from the most up-to-date and expansive software project benchmarking data, particularly in the agile domain.

With this large update, we’ve validated and added more than 2,500 new projects across nine major application domains (Avionics, IT, Command & Control, Microcode, Process Control, Real Time, Scientific, System Software, and Telecom) and 45 sub-domains. The result is a database with more than 13,000 completed projects, extending what is already the largest continuously updated software project metrics database in the world.

With these enhanced data insights -- all gathered from real-world projects -- SLIM Suite users have access to the most up-to-date software project benchmarking data and can quickly and easily sanity-check estimates against industry data.

IT and Agile Projects Get a Boost

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has realized widespread adoption by organizations desiring to accelerate product delivery without sacrificing quality. The alignment of product vision, business value, and development velocity is an key contributor to successful large-scale agile development.  Presented by QSM's Laura Zuber on June 20 at 11:00 AM EST, this upcoming ITMPI webinar demonstrates how scope-based estimation techniques can be used to model the relationship between vision, value, and velocity at different levels of the framework and stages of implementation to guide release planning and management decisions.

Laura Zuber has 25 years of experience in software development consulting, training, and support. She has conducted training and coaching sessions for all QSM SLIM-Suite tools and helped customers implement SLIM across a wide variety of processes and platforms. Laura has managed software development projects, served as a senior software process improvement specialist, performed process assessments, designed and implemented best practices, and authored numerous training programs. She is a Certified Scrum Master and lead consultant for using SLIM with agile development.

Watch the replay!

With agile projects, we hear a lot about the planning benefits of having a fixed number of people with a fixed number of sprints.  All great stuff when it comes to finishing on time and within budget. But one of the things we also need to focus on is the quality of the software.  We often hear stories about functionality getting put on hold because of reliability goals not being met.

There are some agile estimation models available to help with this, and they can provide this information at the release level, before the project starts or during those early sprints. They provide this information by leveraging historical data along with time-tested forecasting models that are built to support agile projects. 

In the first view, you can see the estimate for the number of defects remaining. This is a big picture view of the overall release. Product managers and anyone concerned with client satisfaction can use these models to predict when the software will be reliable enough for delivery to the customer.

In the second view, you can see the total MTTD (Mean Time to Defect) and the MTTD by severity level. The MTTD is the amount of time that elapses between discovered defects. Each chart shows the months progressing on the horizontal axis and the MTTD (in days) improve over time on the vertical axis. 

Big Rock Estimation: Using Agile Techniques to Provide a Rough Software Schedule / Resource Estimate is the third article in the QSM Agile Round Table series.  The QSM Agile Round Table was formed to discuss the role of estimation in agile environments.  QSM customers shared their questions, challenges, and experiences on the relevance and benefits of scope-based estimation in an agile environment.  The Round Table spent several meetings on the key topic of sizing an agile release. The discussion centered around two main questions:

1. How can you determine the size of a release early in absence of a “big upfront requirements phase,” and thus when the requirements are only known at a very high level and subject to refinement and change?
2. How can you determine size in a consistent way across multiple products, projects, and agile teams so that you have good historical data on which to base an estimate?

This and the next article in the QSM Agile Round Table series are based on those discussions. Aaron Jeutter, a participant in the Round Table from Rockwell Automation, presented the technique of “Big Rock Sizing.”  This technique is used at Rockwell Automation for early sizing and estimating based on high level requirements that will be refined using agile techniques as the work progresses.

Read the full article!

This post was originally published on Linkedin. Join the QSM Linkedin Group and Company Page to stay up-to-date with more content like this.

New approaches to software development can sometimes seem at odds with the needs of business customers. For instance, ardent practitioners of the agile development methodology continue to advocate for rapid response approaches and the need for constant iteration to solve complex problems. On the other hand, companies and customers are demanding a strategic approach that provides insight into process, timing, and costs.

So, which of these yin and yang scenarios should developers employ? The answer is “both.”

Enter scope-based software estimation, which I maintain can be a powerful tool to ensure that projects remain on course and on budget. It is possible for schedule and budget estimation to be achieved without sacrificing any of the things that make agile development so potent.

Not everyone feels the same. Some would argue that there’s simply no place for estimates in an agile development world; that estimates cannot coexist with agile or “lean” methodologies like Scrum, which encourage teamwork, speed, and communication without constraints.