Software Management by Numbers

Course Description

Reducing delivery time, increasing quality, and increasing productivity have always been goals of application development organizations. With tight labor markets and increasing pressure to deliver ever faster and cheaper, these goals are more important than ever. So it is not surprising that the popularity of the quality standards and process models has grown over the past few decades.

Successfully implementing improvement initiatives requires the institutionalization of a measurement process. Within a project or organization, it is often easy to get people enthused about metrics. But all too often, this enthusiasm does not translate into action. Even when it does, it is unlikely to be sustained, people might get lost in incomplete details.

Management needs the ability to step back from the details and see the bigger, complete picture. The critical success factor here is defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that cover a multi-dimensional view that goes far beyond an earned value chart. The goal of these KPIs is to foster greater visibility and faster reaction to opportunities and threats, hereby enabling informed decision-making. Once management starts actively using such KPIs, projects are forced to bring and keep their measurement process in place

In this workshop, a powerful set of 16 best practice KPIs is presented, using a multidimensional perspective, together with benchmarking data (industry, best-in-class). This enables a quantitative assessment of a software manufacturer‘s capability and define an underpinned business case for improvements with quantified targets.

Objectives

This course provides a methodology of creating and using a set of KPIs for measuring the performance of building software in an organization. It includes the presentation of benchmarking data as well as well as strategies for improving the software capability. You will be provided a set of tools and knowledge that can be used in any organization. To improve the way the software is build.

Audience and prerequisites

Software measurement and metrics specialists, project managers, functional managers, testers, quality engineering, developers, and other software project stakeholders involved in selecting, designing, implementing and utilizing software metrics and measures to obtain information about their software products, processes, services and projects.

Topics

1. What is Software Capability?

a. Software industry today.
b. Payoff of process improvement?
c. Schedule/effort trade-offs.
d. Rules of thumb for estimation.

2. Best practice Key Performance Indicators.

a. Project performance (schedule, effort, staffing rate, productivity).
b. Process efficiency (cost of quality).
c. Product scope (features, size and re-use).
d. Product quality (complexity, test coverage, defect density, removal efficiency).

3. Benchmarking.

a. Average industry data.
b. Best-in-class industry data.
c. Gap analysis.

4. Improving Software Capability.

a. Prioritization and target setting.
b. Business case definition.

Methodology

This workshop is taught through (limited) lecture and interactive discussion. Actual examples from the software industry are utilized to make the information relevant. The focus is on team exercises (one case study), in which learned skills are practiced. The emphasis of this workshop is on quantitative techniques that allow the attendees to transition the skills learned in this workshop to their own work environments. Solutions to all exercises will be provided.

Trainer

Dr. Hans Sassenburg

He received a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands) in 1986 and a PhD degree in economics from the University of Groningen (Netherlands) in 2006. He worked as an independent consultant until 1996, when he co-founded a consulting and training firm. This company specialized in software process improvement and software architecture and was sold in 2000. In 2001 he moved to Switzerland, where he founded a new consulting and training firm SE-CURE AG (www.se-cure.ch). In addition, he has been a visiting scientist at the Software Engineering Institute since January of 2005. He is a widely published and well-known speaker on software management topics.