QSM provides unparalleled support throughout the product acquisition, installation, and implementation process.
For nearly five decades, QSM has helped organizations bring data-driven discipline to software project estimation, tracking, and benchmarking. Our methodology and tools turn project complexity into measurable, defensible outcomes.
Traditional software productivity metrics fail to capture the efficiency of complex, non-repetitive design processes like software development.
Traditional productivity metrics work well for repetitive manufacturing processes, but software development is fundamentally different: it’s complex, nonlinear, and highly variable from project-to-project.
Many factors influence productivity — from staffing patterns to software complexity — and these interactions are often unclear.
Without a consistent, well‑defined measurement process, organizations struggle to determine the ROI of IT investments, evaluate vendor performance, or assess whether process improvements (including AI initiatives) are delivering actual value.
For teams competing for contracts or funding, the inability to demonstrate superior performance puts them at a significant disadvantage.
Common challenges include:
These issues make it hard to answer essential questions such as:How productive are we really? How do we compare to peers? Where should we invest next?
QSM provides an objective, analytics‑based approach to measuring software productivity and project success.Our Productivity Index (PI) models the nonlinear relationships between Size, Time, and Effort, capturing one of the biggest drivers of software cost and quality: schedule pressure. This provides a more meaningful and accurate measure of performance than traditional metrics.Using the SLIM tool suite, organizations can:
QSM experts remove the guesswork by providing quantitative assessments, identifying the drivers behind low‑ and high‑performing projects, and helping you build a sustainable measurement practice that grows with each completed project.
Maintain a completed project database using over 300 predefined and custom software metrics to support data-driven decisions.
Analyze software project outcomes and generate statistical performance trends to improve estimates and identify process improvement opportunities.
Show how your software team's productivity and quality compare to organizations building similar products.
Establishes your enterprise-wide capability for collecting, maintaining, and using performance data to drive better estimates and business decisions.
A global transportation and shipping company, maintaining 2500+ systems, leveraged QSM products and consulting and reduced the cost of rebaselining out-of-scope software projects by 90% and improved stakeholder satisfaction from more on-time deliveries.
Case Study · Global transportation/shipping corporation with over 280,000 employees world wide
A government client hires QSM to perform a software productivity benchmark and learns they are overstaffing their projects. Cutting their team size in half enabled delivery of a higher quality product with twice as much functionality at a savings of $4.3M dollars.
Case Study · Government IT Developer
A major utility company's IT department used QSM's software productivity benchmarking and IT portfolio budget analysis services, which identified $2.5M in probable overruns plus $5M in savings, and implements dramatically improved software estimation processes.
Case Study · Major Electric Utility Company
One of the largest US financial institutions IT department implements Estimation Center of Excellence to stop software project cost overruns and saves over $1.2M.
Case Study · Financial services company with over 30,000 employees
A major transportation provider faced a huge tax liability related to a software portfolio that they acquired in a merger. QSM performed independent estimates of the cost to rebuild the applications and reduced their tax liability by $50 million.
Case Study · Major Transportation Provider
The importance of measuring productivity and effort, in addition to size and duration, to support agile release planning.
High performing companies already know that superior software estimation is not only possible, but essential to gaining and keeping a competitive edge while simultaneously helping to protect IT investments and drive positive project outcomes.
These studies of completed software projects in the QSM Database, aim to determine the optimal team size for productive and successful agile development projects.
QSM has over four decades of solving software estimation and performance problems. We offer a variety of solutions – products, services, or a combination of both - specifically tailored to your needs.
Tell us more about your current challenges and let us show you how we can help.