Cloud computing is revolutionizing the way firms host software applications, store and access data, and manage IT infrastructure.  Like any quantum leap in technology, the move to the Cloud brings both opportunities and challenges. A recent public Cloud adoption survey found that only 43% of respondents considered their most recent public Cloud migration an overall success. IT departments moving to the Cloud have a thousand decisions to make. All of them require good data and a solid grasp of business goals, current capabilities, and resources. They also need a simple, practical way to predict future staffing and skills gaps, present options to stakeholders and management, build support, and adjust plans when conditions and priorities change. In this white paper, Kate Armel explains where general purpose estimation tools can help you quickly create and revise estimates, establish repeatable estimation processes, sanity check plans against proven performance, and mitigate known – and hidden - migration risks.

Read the white paper!

Although the software industry is known for growth and change, one thing has remained constant: the struggle to reduce cost, improve time to market, increase quality and maintainability, and allocate resources most efficiently. So how can we combat future challenges in a world where everything is software, from the systems in your car to the thermostat in your home to the small computer in your pocket? By using practical measurement and metrics, we can get a bird's-eye view of where we've been and where we could go, while keeping us grounded in data. Leveraging QSM's industry database of over 13,000+ completed projects, Katie Costantini takes a high-level look at changes to software schedules, effort/cost, productivity, size, and reliability metrics from 1980 to 2019. The current study compares insights to similar studies QSM has completed at regular intervals over the past four decades and answers questions like, 'what is the "typical" project over time?' and 'why are projects "shrinking?"' The results may surprise you!

Read the full white paper!

It is no coincidence that this year’s release of the 2014 QSM Software Almanac has been coined the Research Edition. The data, research, insights, analysis and trends packed into the 200+ page book truly make it the ultimate resource for software development and estimation. That said, I thought I’d share just a few of the highlights from this year’s Almanac as a little teaser to what you’ll find when you download the full (and free) resource.

Function point analysis has played an important role in software measurement and analysis for 30 years, but what will be the role of function points in the future? Will they have staying power? Expanding off of a recent article for IFPUG's Metrics Views, Don Beckett looks at the QSM software project database and examines a set of validated projects counted in function points that have completed since the year 2000 to see what they tell about productivity, schedule, and staffing. We are fortunate to have several thousand projects in this sample to work with as this allows us to parse the data many different ways and still have enough projects to be statistically significant. For this study only unadjusted function points were used.

Read the full white paper!