QSM hosts a free advice column for software professionals who seek help to solve project management, communication and general software project issues. Carol Dekkers is a QSM consultant and IT measurement and project management expert who speaks internationally on topics related to software development. Send your questions to Ask Carol!

Dear Carol: 

My manager frequently says “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” and then tells us to collect more and more metrics, willy-nilly. We’ve done this for years now and it just doesn’t seem to make sense to collect all this data that’s never used, when we’ve got better things to do like developing software. What can we do to make him stop this unproductive exercise?

– Over Metricated

Dear Over: 

 This is a common situation in software development: management pursuit of metrics without a clear plan to use them.

The “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a paraphrase of Tom DeMarco’s quote, “You can't manage what you can't control, and you can't control what you don't measure.”¹ What is interesting is that DeMarco’s follow-up quote 13 years later is seldom cited: “Metrics cost a ton of money. It costs a lot to collect them badly and a lot more to collect them well... At its best... metrics can inform and guide developers, and help organizations to improve.  At its worst, it can do actual harm… And there is an entire range between the two extremes...”² 

QSM hosts a free advice column for software professionals who seek help to solve project management, communication and general software project issues. Carol Dekkers is a QSM consultant and IT measurement and project management expert who speaks internationally on topics related to software development. Send your questions to Ask Carol!

Dear Carol: 

I’ve been a member of many software development teams and I simply don’t understand the point of doing early project estimates before we know what are the requirements. It just causes problems once the project starts because the estimate becomes the budget and drives the schedule. Obviously, the estimates are wrong because they are based on flawed/incomplete data, so why would anyone even bother doing an estimate when the budget and schedule go awry as soon as the project starts? Estimates cause management and project managers to “stress out” trying to meet an artificial date and budget – we ought to abandon estimates and just get to work on the project! What am I missing here? 

- Looking for answers     

Dear Looking:

You’re not the first person to question the point of estimating before requirements are known; it can seem futile when it seems that they turn into budgets and schedules.  Even though there is uncertainty (and risk) with early estimates, there are reasons that companies do early estimates:

QSM hosts a free advice column for software professionals who seek help to solve project management, communication and general software project issues. Carol Dekkers is a QSM consultant and IT measurement and project management expert who speaks internationally on topics related to software development. Send your questions to Ask Carol!

Hi Carol:

Thanks for this excellent initiative. One of my key clients is planning to move away from FP counting as they think it’s expensive, takes time, does not measure non-functional work and also they do not want to invest in auditing the FP results. Instead, they are considering using LOC. We have tried explaining them all the shortcoming of LOC but no use. In fact we advised them to use SNAP along with FP but looks like they are just focusing on cost!

In your article on 'Size Matters', I noticed you had mentioned few other techniques to measure size like RICE Objects and Implementation Units. Would like to learn more about these and would like to understand if these are industry standards. Can you please share some insights?

– Sizing Enthusiast

Dear Sizing:

Because you are someone who knows the value of functional sizing (aka function points,) it is frustrating when management focuses on the cost of measurement rather than the value delivered.  I’m wondering whether there is a disconnect between the perceived value and the cost of FP counting. There are a couple of potential issues here that I’d like you to consider before we get into the sizing alternatives

As 2013 begins to wind down and everyone begins making plans for 2014, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on all the projects we’ve worked on this year.  Despite our relatively small company size, we’ve managed to accomplish quite a bit over the last year.  Below, I’ll recap everything we’ve been up to and also highlight some of our great resources and publications in case you missed them earlier:

Is your agile team’s velocity constant from sprint to sprint? No? That’s not a surprise. Many teams assume that their velocity will be constant. In this article, the third in a series recently published on Projectmanagement.com, QSM's Andy Berner explains why that’s not the right expectation--and how that affects how you use this metric.

Andy Berner is a software engineer and methodologist. He came to QSM in 2012 after over 25 years in both large and small software organizations, including, among others, EDS (now HP), Rational Software and IBM. Based on his experience in almost every role in software development, Andy has consulted with numerous organizations on using software development methods and tools to improve productivity and quality.

Read the full article!

In our recent webinar, Function Point Analysis Over the Years, presented by Don Beckett, we received some great questions from our audience. Here are the highlights from the Q&A:

Q: The advice in recent years is to break large projects down into smaller ones to make them more likely to "succeed" by whatever measure. Is the advice now to make projects bigger?

A: I don't know if it's advice, but the data seemed to indicate that there is a benefit to grouping projects by larger size than the projects that are 50 or 100 function points. So I would say, where it's possible, where they can be grouped together, it would be a good idea.

Q: Why do you use the PI (Productivity Index) as opposed to the industry standard hours per function point or function points per person month?

A: Well hours per function point and function points per person month are ratios that take the ratio between effort and size and what we have found is that the schedule has a huge impact on how productive a project can be. The PI incorporates three major things: the size of the project, the amount of effort leveraged against it, and the time required to do it, so in a sense, it accounts for schedule, which function points per person month does not do. So that's why we use it.

Q: How do we convert a project from SLOC to function points to find the PI for a specific project?

QSM will be hosting a new free advice column for software professionals who seek help to solve project management, communication and general software project issues. The first few scenarios are based on questions we receive all the time. Carol Dekkers is a QSM consultant and IT measurement and project management expert who speaks internationally on topics related to software development. Send your questions to Ask Carol!

Dear Carol: 

I’m a systems analyst working for a telecom company and I have several projects on the go at the same time.  Our PMO (Project Management Office) told us that now we have to start tracking the size of our projects both at the beginning and at the end.  I can’t believe this – it’s just more metrics and (redundant) data.  I already track project size because I do time reporting (by project) and all they need to do is add up my hours at the end and voila, you’ve got the project size: the more hours it took - the bigger the project.  They don’t seem to get it and I’ve asked for an exemption from this overhead task. Their response was to enroll me in a two day sizing course!  What can I do to prove to them that they already have the size because I keep track of my hours? 

- Frustrated in Seattle

Dear Frustrated:

Think of a time when you gave a presentation that did not go well.  Was the actual content of your presentation subpar, or was it that something lacked in the delivery?  More likely than not, your answer was the latter (after all, why would you present something if it wasn’t worthwhile?). 

When putting together a presentation, I’ve found that the overall aesthetics can drastically impact how your message is received.  Seemingly small things, such as displaying a graph that uses clashing colors or an undesirable font can sometimes overshadow the content you are trying to deliver.

In her recent blog post titled Customizing SLIM-Suite Workbooks, Katie Costantini discussed how the default workbooks in SLIM-Estimate, SLIM-Metrics, SLIM-MasterPlan, and SLIM-Control can be customized.

I applied the techniques outlined in her post to one of the Sample Files to give my presentation slides a more modern look and feel.  Below is a ‘Before and After’ view of a sample SLIM-Metrics Workbook View. 

Before:

After:

A couple of years ago at a lean software and systems conference, I delivered a “lightning talk” about software metrics. In the two-minute time span, I illustrated the folly of gathering data without a measurement plan and the audience grasped the concept immediately.  “Why don’t more companies get this?” remarked several attendees, “it just doesn’t make sense to collect all the data we do without a plan.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to succeed with software measurement; professionals with a straightforward plan can quickly and easily reap its benefits. Two concepts are fundamental to embrace for metrics success:  1. Goal-Question-Metric (GQM), and 2. Simplicity.  

Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) Approach to Metrics

First introduced by Victor Basili as an approach to measurement, and later the subject of a book by the same name by Rini vanSoligen and Egon Berghout, GQM is a straight-forward, stepwise approach to measurement.  While it has applicability to measurement in any industry, Basili created GQM specifically to address the chaos in the software world.  GQM involves three steps:

1. Establish the Goals for measurement.
2. Ask the Questions that will answer whether the goals are being met.
3. Design and collect the Metrics to answer the questions.

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA expanded Victor Basili’s GQM approach to GQIM, the “I” being indicator, but that is the topic of a future post.