| Measurement |
Workshop Community: MeasurementAfter this day you will know why measurements are the ONLY important thing to focus on FOR YOUR CAREER and YOUR BUSINESS bottom-line. Well, maybe not the only thing, but it is definitely a strong support to all other process improvement activities, and if you want to make your own contribution visible, and if you want to predict the bottom-line, you definitely have to measure...Key Speakers - Moderation - Discussion - Exercise
Workshop 2012The workshop "Measurement" took place at the EuroSPI Conference, 25.6.2012, 9.00 - 17.00 at BENA Business Base Nineteen, Vienna, Austria, Room: KR3.Moderated by:
Pekka Forselius is CEO, business partner, and Certified Scope Manager (CSM) at 4SUM Partners Inc. He developed the Experience Pro data-collection and benchmarking concept and is the product manager of Experience Pro software, a tool for IT project estimation and scope management. Forselius is researcher and developer of ICT project management methods, and main architect of northernSCOPE™ and FiSMA Functional Size Measurement method, published as ISO/IEC 29881:2010 International Standard. Pekka is a member of the Executive Board of the international benchmarking organisation (ISBSG), since 2001, as the President 2007-2011. He was also a member of the Executive Board of the Finland Information Processing Association (FIPA) 2004-2005. He is internationally recognized author of over a hundred articles and conference papers and co-author of six books (e.g. Practical Software Project Estimation, McGraw&Hill, 2010 and Program Management TOOLKIT for software and systems development, Talentum/TTL, 2008).
Forselius is a well-known speaker and popular instructor, and his main topics are related to project management, software measurement, requirements management, benchmarking, IT acquisition management and most recently, scope management. He is the Chair of the ECQA Job Role Committee for Certified SCOPE Manager.
Why should you attend, or should you?If your competition is increasing, if your customers are complaining more than before, if your company owners require better profitability and productivity, or if you want to conquer new markets, where you are not yet known, you should probably consider measurement.
Measurement activities are considered very difficult, time consuming and more or less scientific work. Everyone involved in a large corporation for several years has seen – or heard about - failed attempts to implement measurement programs. Everyone has become familiar to frequent organisational changes as well: in many companies major organisational changes take place every year, and the middle management will be circulated from one position to another. Thanks god, relationships with the key customers, evolution of product families, project management practices, and use of development technologies tend to be more stable.
Organisational measurement programs fail, because they are connected to objects with no stability, and managers with no long-term-plans and no genuine commitment. The measurement programs often try to measure too rarely changing phenomena, and ignore all metrics that would require any human effort to get measured. “Goal-question-metrics”, the GQM approach is excellent, IF the organisation setting the goals is stable, and the decision-makers within the company are – and will stay - committed over time. Unfortunately this is not very common. Measurement driven software acquisition and IT project management have proven very successful recently, e.g. within northernSCOPE™ and southernSCOPE communities, in Finland and in Australia, and some other places between. Those two scope management concepts emphasize the importance of measurement at project level. They bring in metrics driven cost management, and the measurements are run and reported in every two or four weeks. In such project or development program contexts the measurement activities are not as sensitive and middle management related as within corporate wide organisational learning contexts. In this full day workshop the attendees will discuss and learn about the most useful and practical measurements, which can be implemented with rather low effort in any ICT related organisation, no matter what the level of maturity is. We will also discuss about the key issue: how to get measurement practices wanted and institutionalized within a company?
Topics of the workshop:1. Motivation to measure
During this first session you will learn why believing ‘the world is flat’ not necessarily excludes you from fundamental useful wisdom of the universe. You will also learn why the same principles apply to your measurement program, and how you can use the principles to create a strong motivation for measuring process performance in your organisation. 2. Size matters!
Ten hours effort is ten hours effort, twenty defects are twenty defects, but these figures don’t tell anything about the development productivity or the quality of the deliveries, if you don’t know the size of the product. This second session will introduce the ISO/IEC standardized Functional Size Measurement methods, and let the audience to try some of them with a small set of functional user requirements. 3. Impact of non-functional requirements and other productivity factors; how to measure and evaluate them?
International software product quality standards are not well enough known by the practitioners of the ICT industry. Neither customers nor developers have recognized the benefits of using standardized sets of quality characteristics, when discussing about the quality requirements. There are too many ‘quality experts’, whose understanding of the product quality is really narrow, emphasizing only usability, or only processing performance, or pure reliability. However, both ISO/IEC 9126 and the new ISO/IEC 25000 series have a very nice, multidimensional viewpoint over software quality. Differences in quality should explain a remarkable part of differences in development effort and product price. In addition to quality issues, there are several other productivity factors that shall be understood and measured, when we want to understand the behavior of software development or maintenance productivity better. These factors may also be a very useful input for software process improvement activity. 4. Measurement data collection and management: what, how, and who?
Should we collect our own data and use our own repository only, or would it be beneficiary to look at some common experience databases? International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) has collected world wide data into two separate repositories: D&E for software Development and Enhancement projects, and M&S for application Maintenance and Support work. All these data records contain information about the functional size of the target software, and the effort for the development or maintenance. What else should we collect? How to use GQM to help this decision? 5. Closing panel discussion
An open forum for additional questions, ideas and conclusions, that have risen during the workshop day.
Other instructors:
Morten holds currently position of a Process Specialist at DELTA - a Danish research and consultancy company. He has worked as a global SPI manager in a large telecom company and has supported companies from 20 people to IT departments of 3500 employees as a consultant. Morten has performed more than 100 assessments in both vendor and customer organisations. Mr. Korsaa is SEI certified "Introduction to CMMI Instructor" and is proud to be a member of teams developing the ImprovAbility model, the PI manager education, and the SPI Manifesto.
Marcel Pereboom is an experienced ICT architect, business analyst, project manager and scope manager with excellent analytical skills. He loves working in multidisciplinary teams, using his excellent computer literacy pragmatically to make projects a success for the business, valued by management as well as co-workers. He is a specialist in the area of metrics and benchmarking (20 years; certified FP analyst, certified northernSCOPE™ scope manager, former director of the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group). The last 10 years he has been working in telecommunications in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, participating in the Telemanagement Forum „Concept-to-Market Delivery Toolkit Team“.
Manfred Seufert is a measurement specialist and a member of DASMA Board. He has an excellent expertise in the area of project management and software metrics (including the function-point-analysis). He has many years’ experience in project management with own projects and coaching of project managers. He worked on the definition and introduction of innovation processes. His main project management focus was on projects within the telecommunication industry that included the IT and the core network domains for post- and prepaid products. This included also a central involvement in the definition of the logical architectural changes and the technical implementation of new or changed architectural solutions. His second topic is the introduction of metrics to support the business processes and the project management. This includes the whole process to introduce new methods and new metrics including the internal promotion, vendor management, function-point-analysis, training and coaching of specialists.
Workshop Communities:
|
