A Year in Review

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:

1. We published seven articles and whitepapers covering a variety of topics including Agile development, Function Point trends, and estimation.  A complete list can be found here.
2. The Consulting team has implemented Estimation Centers of Excellence with three new clients this year.  You can watch a replay of our webinar on Building an Estimation Center of Excellence here.
3. The QSM Database and trendlines were updated to include our most recent project data.  The Performance Benchmark Table highlights the industry average trends for our Business, Engineering, and Real Time applications.
4. Our Function Point Languages Table was also updated to reflect our new trend data.  This can be used to look up gearing factors for 37 different programming languages when using Function Points for sizing.
5. QSM released its latest version of the SLIM-Suite. Read about all the new features offered in version 8.1 by downloading the release notes.
6. The Sales team provided a lot of client outreach by attending various conferences and giving demonstrations of our estimation tools. This year, there has been a lot of interest in how to use our web-based application, SLIM-WebServices, as both a standalone solution, and in conjunction with our desktop application, SLIM-Suite.  Other areas of interest that we have seen grow over the past year include how to use parametric estimation techniques to estimate and model Agile development, as well as other development lifecycles.
7. As thought-leaders in the field of parametric estimation, our Research team has published dozens of blog posts on a variety of topics including: tutorials on tool usage, metrics and data collection, best practices, sizing, and even our new Ask Carol advice column.  Subscribe to our blog to receive email updates.
8. In addition to our monthly courses offered at the McLean office and on-site training at client locations, we are now offering a new web-based SLIM training class, to reach and train a broader group of SLIM users.
9. Adding to our list of distributors, QSM partnered with RedBay Consulting to provide SLIM tools, consulting services, training and customer support in Australia, Asia, and Pacific regions, operating under the name QSM Asia-Pacific.
10. We are pleased to announce that we have expanded our “QSM family” by hiring five additional employees to help support our Consulting and Research & Technical Support teams.  We are very excited to welcome Pam Simonovich, Mike Pearl, Gary Huber, Hugh Klipp, and Jennifer Jo Manuel!

From all of us at QSM, we wanted to wish you Happy Holidays and fabulous 2014!

2013 Articles

Constant Velocity is a Myth

Ready, Set, Go… and Ready Again: Planning to Groom the Backlog

All In: Collaborative Software Estimates

Is it Bigger than a Breadbox? Getting Started with Release Estimation

Does Agile Scale?

Data-Driven Estimation, Management Leads to High Quality

An Analysis of Function Point Trends