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!

What do you do if you want to improve a process and have 100 candidate predictor variables?  How do you decide where to direct causal analysis effort?  Similarly, what if you want to create an estimating model and you have so many factors you do not know where to start? Data mining techniques can be used to filter many variables down to a vital few to attack first or to build estimating models to predict important outcomes. CrossTalk Magazine, January 2011.

Read the full article here.

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 leading to 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 presented papers at numerous conferences. He has one US patent and two patents pending.

It’s time to update QSM’s industry trends and we need your help! Contributing data ensures that the database reflects a wide spectrum of project types, languages, and development methods. It helps us conduct ground-breaking research and improve our suite of estimation, tracking, and benchmarking tools. Contributors benefit from the ability to sanity-check estimates, ongoing projects, and completed projects against the best industry trends in the business.

 We're validating over 400 new projects, but we can always use more – especially in the Real Time, Microcode, and Process Control application domains. So what do you need to do to ensure your firm is represented in the next trend line update? That’s easy! Simply send us your DataManager (.smp files) or completed SLIM-Control (.scw) workbooks. Here’s the recommended minimum data set:

• Project Name
• Status = “Completed” only – no estimates or in progress projects
• Application type and sub-type (if applicable)
• Phase 3 time. Can be calculated from the phase end/start date or entered as a value (e.g.: 3.2 months)
• Phase 3 effort
• Effective Size (the number of new and or modified functional size units used to measure the application – objects, SLOC, function points, database tables). Please include a gearing factor if the project was sized in something other than Source Lines of Code

Additional information allows us to perform more sophisticated queries: