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Industry Benchmarks: Insights and Pitfalls Software and technology managers often quote industry benchmarks such as The Standish Group's CHAOS report on software project failures; other organizations use this data to judge their internal operations. Although these external benchmarks can provide insights into your company's software development performance, you need to balance the picture with internal information to make an objective evaluation. Jim Brosseau takes a deeper look at common benchmarks, including the CHAOS report, published SEI benchmark data, and more. He describes the pros and cons of these commonly used industry benchmarks with key insights into often-quoted statistics. Take away an approach that Jim has used successfully with companies to help them gain an understanding of the relationship between the demographics, practices, and performance in their groups and how these relate to external benchmarks.
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Jim Brosseau, Clarrus Consulting Group, Inc.
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Successful Outsourcing with the Crawl-Walk-Run Strategy Large organizations may have the resources for expensive, big-bang offshore outsourcing projects. But what should small- and medium-sized organizations do when tasked with outsourcing? Based on his experiences, Uttiya Dasgupta describes a usable and inexpensive process for planning an offshore outsourcing strategy for small- to medium-sized development organizations. This crawl-walk-run strategy starts with very small projects and moves to increasingly more complex ones, supported by adequate preparation for each stage. Beginning with a vision of the "run" stage, teams plan the first stages to test out processes and ensure the cultural and technology fit between the internal and outsourced organizations. Uttiya shares his insights for successful offshore outsourcing projects and, especially, the signs and metrics that tell you when you are ready to move from crawling to walking-to running.
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Uttiya Dasgupta, Omnispan LLC
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Process Improvement - Can I Make a Difference? Although some organizations already have formal processes in place, many do not. Most process improvement begins with one person or one department deciding to do something rather than accepting the status quo. With the right attitude, some simple tools, and a proven method for improvement, you can make a difference for yourself, your department, and ultimately, your organization. Stephanie Penland has helped numerous small and large organizations with process improvement. Sharing her experiences-both successes and failures-Stephanie describes her real-world approach for process improvement. Find new ways to overcome obstacles and obtain buy-in from the top down. Learn what it takes to get a process improvement program off the ground. Take back with you a sample of a successful process improvement plan.
- The benefits of process improvement and ways to measure success
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Stephanie Penland, SAS Institute Inc
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Managing Distributed Teams Globalization, open source software, and cheap communications have forever changed the structure of software development project teams. Project managers face a new set of challenges with geographically distributed work teams. Unclear expectations, language and idiom differences, lack of direct supervision, and a lack of accountability are just a few of the issues that project managers must overcome. As the leader of a development team with members and customers all over the world, Keith Casey is intimately familiar with the character of distributed teams. He explains why you need a coherent strategy-and that means more than email, instant messaging, conference calls, and software tools-for effectively executing a distributed development project. Join Keith for a discussion of the strategies you can use to avoid the disasters awaiting those who ignore the needs of a distributed team.
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Keith Casey, CaseySoftware, LLC
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Beat the Odds in Vega$: Measurement Theory Applied to Development and Testing James McCaffrey describes in detail how to use measurement theory to create a simple software system that predicts with 87 percent accuracy the results of NFL professional football game scores. So, what does this have to do with a conference about developing better software? You can apply the same measurement theory principles embedded in this program to more accurately predict or compare results of software development, testing, and management. Using the information James presents, you can extend the system to predict the scores in other sports and apply the principles to a wide range of software engineering problems such as predicting the Web site usage in a new system, evaluating the overall quality of similar systems, and much more.
- Why the statistical approach does not work for making some accurate predictions
- Measurement theory to predict and compare
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James McCaffrey, Volt Information Sciences, Inc.
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Smoke Tests to Signal Test Readiness Plumbers use "smoke tests" to find leaks in pipes when it is impractical to completely seal a plumbing system. We use this term as a metaphor to define a small set of software tests designed to expose big problems instead of committing the resources to run a large suite of tests. Building a powerful smoke test suite is not trivial and not intuitive, requiring an understanding of the product, the test base, and test automation techniques. Join Aditya Dada to learn the attributes of a high quality smoke test suite and what it takes to build and, most importantly, maintain a small set of effective smoke tests. Improve nightly builds, speed up pre-integration testing, and catch huge defects quickly and efficiently with a new smoke test strategy for your software under test.
- Benefits and attributes of smoke tests
- How to manage a smoke test suite with minimum effort
- Real world examples of smoke tests
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Aditya Dada, Sun Microsystems Inc
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A Metrics Dashboard to Drive Goal Achievement Some measurement programs with high aims fall short, languish, and eventually fail completely because few people regularly use the resulting metrics. Based on Cisco Systems' five years of experience in establishing an annual quality program employing a metrics dashboard, Wenje Lai describes their successes and challenges and demonstrates the dashboard in use today. He shows how the metrics dashboard offers an easy-to-access mechanism for individuals and organizations within Cisco Systems to understand the gap between the current standing and their goals. A mechanism within the dashboard allows users to drilldown and see the data making up measurement to identify ownership of issues, root causes, and possible solutions. Learn what programs they implemented to ensure that people use the metrics dashboard to help them in their day-to-day operations.
- How to build an effective metrics dashboard to help achieve quality goals
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Wenje Lai, Cisco Systems Inc
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Even the Best Get Stuck: Transitioning to Agile Developement For some organizations Agile methodologies like XP, Scrum, and Crystal work well off-the-shelf. However, many companies struggle with these practices and find that lightweight methodologies leave them without support for key aspects of their business. Most end up adopting a hybrid of multiple methodologies mixed in with some old practices. This is risky business. Cherry-picking your favorite parts of Agile methodologies can leave you without enough process and in danger of a code-and-fix mentality that relies on heroics to ship software. Alex Pukinskis looks at different paths taken by organizations as they transition to Agile. He discusses key "process smells" that indicate that a project has gone past agility and is slipping into chaos. Alex offers suggestions to get your foundering Agile transition back on track.
- Patterns for adopting Agile practices
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Alex Pukinskis, Rally Software Development
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Why Are Requirements So Poorly Defined? Studies have shown that the quality of the requirements is one of the most important factors in the quality of an application and also in the time and costs required to deliver a system. Yet requirements are almost always ambiguous, incorrect, incomplete, too high level, logically inconsistent, and communicated by rumor. The irony is that the various techniques-which have been around for decades-for writing better requirements have not been widely adopted. The culture and the management of the software process are equally to blame. Richard Bender gets to the root of the problem and discusses ways to address the poor requirements issues. Learn quantitative measures of the quality of the requirements specification and practical approaches to writing unambiguous requirements for your applications.
- Early validation of requirements through testing
- Moving user acceptance test design up prior to the start of coding
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Richard Bender, Bender RBT Inc.
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An Integrated Configuration Management System Revealed Many people talk about an end-to-end software development process in which requirements are developed and transitioned seamlessly into code with tests tracing back to the requirements. Geree Streun has learned that an integrated configuration management system should be at the center of that process. She explains the criteria for evaluating and selecting a configuration management tool to support your development process and why configuration management should be implemented in an integrated way. Find out what an integrated configuration management tool can do for you, how much control to impose, and how much administration you can afford. Watch a demonstration of the integrated configuration management system Geree's company uses to record defects against any software artifact and to ensure that tests track to the current version of the requirements.
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Geree Streun, ANS
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