Welcome to the Software Process and Measurement Cast 98!

The Software Process and Measurement Cast this week features an in interview with Richard Soley.  The interview with Richard wraps up my interviews with the troika of luminaries that are leading the SEMAT initiative.  Richard provides a great wrap up on the goals, benefits and ideas that define SEMAT.

Dr. Richard Mark Soley is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of OMG TM.

As Chairman and CEO of OMG, Dr. Soley is responsible for the vision and direction of the world's largest consortium of its type. Dr. Soley joined the nascent OMG as Technical Director in 1989, leading the development of OMG's world-leading standardization process and the original CORBA® specification. In 1996, he led the effort to move into vertical market standards (starting with healthcare, finance, telecommunications and manufacturing) and modeling, leading first to the Unified Modeling Language TM (UML®) and later the Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®). He also led the effort to establish the SOA Consortium in January 2007, leading to the launch of the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) in 2009. The Initiative now includes Communities of Practice focused on the adoption of BPM and SOA, Green Computing, Event Processing and Cyber Security.
  
Previously, Dr. Soley was a cofounder and former Chairman/CEO of A. I. Architects, Inc., maker of the 386 HummingBoard and other PC and workstation hardware and software. Prior to that, he consulted for various technology companies and venture firms on matters pertaining to software investment opportunities. Dr. Soley has also consulted for IBM, Motorola, PictureTel, Texas Instruments, Gold Hill Computer and others. He began his professional life at Honeywell Computer Systems working on the Multics operating system.

A native of Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A., Dr. Soley holds bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Object Management Group's Website:  http://www.omg.org/

 
Contact information for the Software Process and Measurement Cast
Email:  spamcastinfo@gmail.com
Voicemail:  +1-206-888-6111
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Conferences and Speaking Engagements in 2010 (To Date)
ISMA Cinco in Sao Paulo September 13-15.  I will be one of the featured speakers.  THe title of the presentation is Function Points:  Past, Present and Future.  The website to get more information is http://www.ifpug.org/conferences/  I hope to see you there!

Next!
SPaMCAST 99 we will feature an essay on measuring IT development capacity at a department level.

In Agile, everyone agrees on the concept that continuous improvement is a good thing. In Scrum and also in most Kanban practices we even have a ceremony to support this, namely The Retrospective. This periodically occurring meeting (often every other week) with the entire team plays a vital part in the process and in team [...]

Welcome to the Software Process and Measurement Cast 97!

Software Process and Measurement Cast features an essay on time-to-market which is an excerpt from a new writing project I am calling The Metrics Minute.  You will see more essays from this project in the future and a call to action.

The first few lines . . .

Time-to-market (TTM) is a measure of the calendar duration of a project.  Calendar time  is the granddaddy of all measures of project performance.  The popularity of the measure is driven by its ease of calculation as by definition all projects have a start date and every day that goes by adds one to day to the duration of the project and brings you one day closer to both the predicted and eventual end of the project. Time to market because it's simplicity has a great deal of allure however because of it simplicity it has very little explanatory power. Calendar time is a metric that everyone can understand in theory however how long is too long or why one project takes longer than another can only be answered by making a comparison to something else.

Citrix GoToAssist Express is sponsoring SPaMCAST Solve technical issues faster with GoToAssist Express. Try it FREE for 30 days.

Mastering Software Project Management: Best Practices, Tools and Techniques co-authored by Murali Chematuri and myself and published by J. Ross Publishing has hit the bookshelves!  According to Robert C. Anderson, Director, Process Development and Quality Assurance, Computer Aid, Inc, "Mastering Software Project Management is a masterpiece of clarity, organization and depth of practical knowledge." If you a project manager or know project managers buy yourself a copy and a second to lend co-workers!

Have you bought your copy?

Contact information for the Software Process and Measurement Cast
Email:  spamcastinfo@gmail.com
Voicemail:  +1-206-888-6111
Website: www.spamcast.net
Twitter: www.twitter.com/tcagley
Facebook:  http://bit.ly/16fBWV

Conferences and Speaking Engagements in 2010 (To Date)
ISMA Cinco in Sao Paulo September 13-15.  I will be one of the featured speakers.  The title of the presentation is Function Points:  Past, Present and Future.  The website to get more information is http://www.ifpug.org/conferences/  I hope to see you there!

Next!
SPaMCAST 98 will return to the SEMAT Troika with my interview with Richard Soley on his perspective of the Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT).  I think Richard wraps up the three SEMAT interviews materfully.

In his book “Succeeding with Agile”, Mike Cohn present nine questions that you should ask for a current or proposed team. Questions should be asked iteratively… until you answer “yes” to each. Here are the questions:
* Does the structure accentuate the strengths, shore up the weaknesses, and support the motivations of the team members?
* Does the structure minimize the number of people required to be on two teams (and avoid having anyone on three)?
* Does the structure maximize the amount of time that teams will remain together?
* Are component teams used only in limited and easily justifiable cases?
* Will you be able to feed most teams with two pizzas?
* Does the structure minimize the number of communication paths between teams?
* Does the structure encourage teams to communicate who wouldn’t otherwise do so?
* Does the design support a clear understanding of accountability?
* Did team members have input into the design of the team?

Besides the cultural bias (in Italy, one pizza will usually feed one person but it might be different in the USA…), you could use these questions for every project that you are currently running or plan to run.

Reference: “Succeeding with Agile”, Mike Cohn, Addison-Wesley, 262 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-57936-2

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Here is a list of software development related conferences and events that will take place in September and that have media partnerships with Methods & Tools:

* Mobile Application Stores, September 7 2010, Zurich, Switerland

* iqnite 2010 Schweiz, September 21 2010, Zurich, Switzerland

* Lean & Kanban 2010 Europe, September 23-24 2010, Antwerp, Belgium

* Software Testing Analysis & Review Conference, September 26—October 1 2010, San Diego, USA

* iPhone/iPad DevCon, September 27-29 2010, San Diego, USA

* iqnite Nordic, September 29-30 2010, Stockholm, Sweden

* iqnite United Kingdom, October 4 2010, London, UK

* Agile Eastern Europe, October 8-9, Kyiv, Ukraine

Find more software development conferences

Our software development tools directory has now categorized more than 2000 tools. From project management and unit testing tools to NoSQL databases, you can find tools used in every software development activity, as the 10′000 monthly visitors do, searching by programming language, running platforms or another of our classification criteria.

If you are the committer of an open source project or the marketing manager of a commercial tool, do not hesitate to add your tool. It is free and you will be able to post press releases to communicate about new versions.

Last week I enjoyed to opportunity to speak at the Agile2010 conference in Orlando, Florida. Of course, I also attended many of the other sessions as well. The conference has in my view an excellent atmosphere. Where I expected to find lots of consultants in their typical formal style of dressing I found 1400 people mostly [...]

Welcome to the Software Process and Measurement Cast 96!

The Software Process and Measurement Cast this week features an in interview with Bertrand Meyer.  Bertand and I discussed his ideas on SEMAT and why IT and Academia need to find a common ground to share ideas and knowledge.

From Wikipedia

Bertrand Meye has been Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology since October 2001, where he pursues research on building trusted components (reusable software elements) with a guaranteed level of quality.

Dr. Meyer pursues the ideal of simple, elegant and user-friendly computer languages and is one of the earliest and most vocal proponents of object-oriented programming (OOP). His book Object-Oriented Software Construction is widely considered to be the best work on presenting the case for OOP. Other books he has written include Eiffel: The Language (a description of the Eiffel language), Object Success (a discussion of object technology for managers), Reusable Software (a discussion of reuse issues and solutions), Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages and Touch of Class. He has authored numerous articles and edited conference proceedings.

He is the initial designer of the Eiffel method and language and has continued to participate in its evolution, and is the originator of the Design by Contract development method.

His experiences with object technology through the Simula language, as well as early work on abstract data types and formal specification (including the Z notation), provided some of the background for the development of Eiffel. Eiffel has been influential in the development of other languages including Java, C# and Python.

Bertand is one of the troika of thought leaders that have brought SEMAT to the world.

See Bertand's website for more information and contact data: http://se.ethz.ch/~meyer/

Citrix GoToAssist Express is sponsoring SPaMCAST Solve technical issues faster with GoToAssist Express. Try it FREE for 30 days.

Contact information for the Software Process and Measurement Cast
Email:  spamcastinfo@gmail.com
Voicemail:  +1-206-888-6111
Website: www.spamcast.net
Twitter: www.twitter.com/tcagley
Facebook:  http://bit.ly/16fBWV

Conferences and Speaking Engagements in 2010 (To Date)

ISMA Cinco in Sao Paulo September 13-15.  I will be one of the featured speakers.  THe title of the presentation is Function Points:  Past, Present and Future.  The website to get more information is http://www.ifpug.org/conferences/  I hope to see you there!

Next!
SPaMCAST 97 will feature another essay from the Metrics Minute on Time-to-Market.

Planning has an important role in Agile. The team uses planning to estimate the complexity of a requirement (userstory). The number of complexity points handled in previous timeframes then helps to decide what could fit into the next timeframe. However the complexity changes in time. Things get easier doing it a second time or easier [...]

This is number 8, the third article in a top10 of middleware management pitfalls. The previous article dealt with infrastructure. This time I´ll discuss the application itself. There has been much cool stuff lately about devops and devs and ops working together in one team, like at sky.com. The uncool reality for a lot of companies [...]

Blog: Categorizing the Cloud …

Blog: Patterns and Practices for Improving Personal Productivity, Time Management, and Effectiveness

Blog: Earned Value v. Earned Schedule

Blog: A List of Coding Standard Websites

Blog: TDD at the System Scale

Site: Real QA Manifesto

Humour: My husband is a programmer; I have no idea what that means.

Article: jQuery Test-Driven Development

Article: Are We Headed to Abilene?

Tool: Flerry is a Flex-Java bridge for Adobe AIR 2.0

Tool: Coverlipse is an Eclipse plugin that visualizes the code coverage of JUnit Tests

Video: Managing Ruby Teams

Video: How to Cope with Communication Problems in an Agile Project?

Video: Continuous Integration, Pipelines and Deployment

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.

In the current market it becomes more and more likely that developers in the same team will not be in the same physical location. This is caused by outsourcing, but also other reasons like ever increasing focus on open source projects. In a distributed scenario pair programming has huge benefits over meetings and sending comments on [...]

This book is composed of papers previously written by Watts Humphrey. The people and management aspects of software development are often neglected in books and this one is a good source to start thinking about them… and improving our practice. The book is structured in four parts: managing your projects, managing your teams, managing your boss and managing yourself. In each part, it presents both general principles and real life examples or stories taken from Watts Humphrey career. This makes the book very easy to read as we can connect the theory to situations that we have met in our professional life.

Read the complete review on Sofware Development Books

Reference: “Reflections on Management – How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself”, Watts S. Humphrey and William R. Thomas Addison-Wesley, 260 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-71153-3

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

My three books on agile made this list of “The Top 100 Agile Books” by Jurgen Appelo. He used an objective method of ranking books based on Amazon.com and GoodRead.com quality ratings and popularity. His blog explains the approach. Uncle Bob Martin and I were each fortunate enough to have two books in the top ten.

Just about all the books on the list are worth reading so pick up a few of them if you’re looking for something good to read.

In my previous post, "future of deployment, part 2", i talked about the new ear, which is an image, with an OS and your application. Now before diving into part 3, which gets you going in creating your own virtual appliance aka "the image", there is one really big thing i forgot to mention; Some of [...]

Labor Productivity: An Excerpt From The Metrics Minute

Definition:
Labor productivity measures efficiency of the transformation of labor into something of higher value. Labor productivity (typically called productivity) is a fairly simple manufacturing concept that has been found itself useful in IT. Productivity is the amount of output per unit of input; an example in manufacturing terms can be expressed as10 widgets for every hour worked. Labor productivity is a powerful metric, made even more powerful by it’s simplicity. At its heart, productivity is a measure of the efficiency of a process (or group of processes). That knowledge can be tool to target and facilitate change. The problem with using productivity in a software environment is the lack of a universally agreed upon output unit of measure.

The lack of a universally agreed upon, tangible unit of output (cars in an automobile factory, steel from a steel mill) means that software processes often struggle to define and measure productivity because they’re forced to use esoteric size measures. IT has gone down three paths to solve this problem. The three basic camps to size software include relative measures (e.g. story points), physical measures (e.g. lines of code) and functional measures (e.g. function points). In all cases these measures of software size seek to measure the output of the processes and are defined independently of the input (effort or labor cost).

Formula:
The standard formula for labor productivity is:

Productivity = output / input

If you were using lines of code for productivity, the equation would be as follows:
Productivity = Lines of Code / Hours to Code the Lines of Code

Uses:
There are numerous factors that can influence productivity like skills, architecture, tools, time compression, programming language and level of quality. Organizations want to determine the impact of these factors on the development environment.

The measurement of productivity has two macro purposes. The first purpose is to determine efficiency. When productivity is known a baseline can be produced (line in the sand) then compared to external benchmarks. Comparisons between projects can indicate whether one process is better than another. The ability to make a comparison allows you to use efficiency as a tool in a decision process. The number and types of decisions that can be made using this tool are bounded only by your imagination and the granularity of the measurement.

The second macro rational for measuring productivity is as a basis for estimation. In its simplest form a parametric estimate can be calculated by multiplying size by a productivity rate.

Issues:
1. The lack of a consistent size measure is the biggest barrier for measuring productivity.
2. Poor time accounting runs a close second. Time account issues range from misallocation of time to equating billing time to effort time.
3. Productivity is not a single number and is most accurately described as a curve which makes it appear complicated.

Variants or Related Measures:
1. Cost per unit of work
2. Delivery rate
3. Velocity (agile)
4. Efficiency

Criticisms:
There are several criticisms of the using productivity in the software development and maintenance environment. The most prevalent is an argument that all software projects are different and therefore are better measured by metrics focusing on terminal value rather than by metrics focused on process efficiency (artesian versus manufacturing discussion). I would suggest that while the result of a software project tends to be different most of the steps taken are the same which makes the measure valid but that productivity should never be confused with value.

A second criticism of the use of productivity is a result of improper deployment. Numerous organizations and consultants promote the use of a single number for productivity. The use of a single number to describe the productivity the typical IT organization does match reality at the shop floor level when the metrics is used to make comparisons or for estimation. For example, would you expect a web project to have the same productivity rate of a macro assembler project? Would you expect a small project and a very large project to have the same productivity? In either case the projects would take different steps along their life cycles therefore we would expect their productivity to be different. I suggest that an organization analyze their data to look for clusters of performance. Typical clusters can include: client server projects, technology specific projects, package implementations and many others. Each will have a statistically different signature. An example of a productivity signature expressed as an equation is shown below:

Labor Productivity=46.719177-(0.0935884*Size)+(0.0001578*((Size-269.857)^2))

(Note this is an example of a very specialized productivity equation for a set of client server projects tailored for a design, code and unit testing. The results would not representative a typical organization.)
A third criticism is that labor productivity is an overly simple metric that does not reflect quality, value or speed. I would suggest that two out three of these criticisms are correct. Labor productivity is does not measure speed (although speed and effort are related) and does not address value (although value and effort may be related). Quality may be a red herring if rework due to defects is incorporated into productivity equation. In any case productivity should not be evaluated in a vacuum. Measurement programs should incorporate a palette of metrics to develop a holistic picture of a project or organization.

Welcome to the Software Process and Measurement Cast 95!

Software Process and Measurement Cast features an essay on labor productivity which is an excerpt from a new writing project I am calling The Metrics Minute.  You will see more essays from this project in the future and a call to action.

The first few lines . . .
Labor productivity measures efficiency of the transformation of labor into something of higher value.  Labor productivity (typically called productivity) is a fairly simple manufacturing concept that has been found itself useful in IT.  Productivity is the amount of output per unit of input; an example in manufacturing terms can be expressed as10 widgets for every hour worked. Labor productivity is a powerful metric, made even more powerful by it's simplicity. At its heart, productivity is a measure of the efficiency of a process (or group of processes).

Citrix GoToAssist Express is sponsoring SPaMCAST Solve technical issues faster with GoToAssist Express. Try it FREE for 30 days.

Mastering Software Project Management: Best Practices, Tools and Techniques co-authored by Murali Chematuri and myself and published by J. Ross Publishing has hit the bookshelves!  According to Robert C. Anderson, Director, Process Development and Quality Assurance, Computer Aid, Inc, "Mastering Software Project Management is a masterpiece of clarity, organization and depth of practical knowledge." If you a project manager or know project managers buy yourself a copy and a second to lend co-workers!

Contact information for the Software Process and Measurement Cast
Email:  spamcastinfo@gmail.com
Voicemail:  +1-206-888-6111
Website: www.spamcast.net
Twitter: www.twitter.com/tcagley
Facebook:  http://bit.ly/16fBWV

Conferences and Speaking Engagements in 2010 (To Date):
ISMA Cinco in Sao Paulo September 13-15.  I will be one of the featured speakers.  The title of the presentation is Function Points:  Past, Present and Future.  The website to get more information is http://www.ifpug.org/conferences/  I hope to see you there!

Next!
SPaMCAST 96 will return to the SEMAT Troika with my interview with Bertran Meyer on his perspective of the Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT).

I finally got around to something today that had been on my to do list for over a year: record a short video showing how to load user stories into www.PlanningPoker.com by copying them from Excel.

Here’s the video:

My thanks to my daughter, Savannah, who learned Camtasia for Mac while I was traveling last week and then helped me make this today.

Scene opens... An idyllic landscape unfolds before our eyes, in yonder distance we see a figure approaching us. He goes by the name of Arthur, King of the Britons... public class Arthur { // Some internals or Arthur, will be revisited later. }   When we turn around, we see a gorge. Over the gorge lies an old rope-bridge with wooden [...]

We invite you to propose a session for this leading software development conference. We have a long tradition of high quality sessions covering many aspects of software development, from programming languages (e.g., Java, C#, Python, Erlang, Haskell, Ruby, Groovy, C, C++, etc.), and technologies (libraries, frameworks, databases, etc.) to subjects about the wider development environment such as testing, architecture and design, development process, analysis, patterns, project management, and softer aspects such as team building, communication and leadership.

Sessions may be either tutorial-based, presentations of case studies, or take the form of interactive workshops. We are always open to novel formats, so please contact us with your idea. The standard length of a session is 90 minutes, with some exceptions. In order to allow less experienced speakers to speak at the conference without the pressure of filling a full 90 minutes, we reserve a number of shorter 45 minute sessions.

http://accu.org/index.php/conferences