Historically, only 20% of software projects are completed successfully and with software becoming critical to nearly every company and industry, having such a high rate of failure is simply unacceptable anymore. It is for this reason that QSM has recently released, “Understanding Software Estimation, Negotiation, and Demand Management,” a collection of articles that will aid anyone from project managers to CIOs in implementing software estimation, negotiation and demand management methods efficiently to reduce costs.

Larry Putnam, Sr., founder of QSM and a pioneer and top problem solver in the software estimation and measurement field, provides the foreword to the book, which is co-authored by his son and granddaughter, Doug Putnam and Taylor Putnam-Majarian. Combined, the authors bring more than 40 years of experience in software measurement to a range of topics, including:

• The IT innovation cycle
• The most common reasons why software projects fail and what you can do about it
• Fact-based decisions – How to establish a baseline
• The software production equation and Rayleigh Staffing Model
• Multiple release and complex program estimation
• Capacity planning and demand management
• Tracking, forecasting, execution, and post mortem
• Understanding quality and reliability
• What does it take to successfully implement estimation? 

Released due to a demand for software estimation resources from customers and the industry, the book provides analysis of historical software projects to provide industry insights. The statistics used in this analysis come from the QSM Metrics Database, which includes data from over 10,000 completed software projects from North and South America, Australia, Europe, Africa, and Asia, representing over 740 million lines of code, 600+ development languages, and 105,833 person years of effort.