Our new video series, Software Size Matters! Why Quantifying Software Size is Critical for Project Estimating, Tracking, and Performance Benchmarking, explores how you not only can but should be using software size measures at every stage of the software project, program, or portfolio management process. We created this video series to help you improve the accuracy of your software estimates, plans and forecasts because software size matters. 

The core management metrics used for software estimation and software project management - schedule (duration), effort (cost), quality (defects) and developer productivity - all increase with software size (scope).  This may not surprise you. But did you know that they increase in a nonlinear fashion?  This is why estimating and managing software projects is challenging!

How good are your software project estimates compared to the actual time and money spent when the project's completed? If you want to improve your software estimation accuracy, this video series is for you!

Watch Episode 1: Introduction

Quantifying software size helps you with:

How many times have you been involved with a software project or a portfolio of projects where the schedule or budget is doomed from the start? It happens all the time. One of the best ways to avoid this problem is to leverage historical data – actual performance of completed software projects. QSM has over 46 years experience in software estimation and control. We have seen thousands of projects and products delivered, both in-house and vendor driven. One of the biggest problems we help our clients solve is negotiating the right cost and schedule targets. Whether advising a client on an in-house project, a vendor on their proposal, or an end user with a bid evaluation decision, one thing becomes very clear − all sides are trying to negotiate a cost and timeline that they feel comfortable with. The problem is that they often negotiate with little to no data of past performance.

Negotiating Initial Schedule and Budget Commitments

You don't need data from hundreds of projects, and it doesn’t need to be granular. Software project or release level data is a great place to start. It establishes a baseline that you can count on because the delivery targets have been achieved in the past. It is tough to argue with cost and schedule numbers that have already been proven, and of course, having the data at your fingertips gives you a leg to stand on when negotiating.

The best practice we recommend is to capture a few core metrics: