Skip to main content

SLIM-Metrics for Software Benchmarking

SLIM gives you the power to benchmark your organization's performance against industry top performers.

Request a Demo

Software Productivity and Performance Analytics

Do you know how your software development teams are performing against their peers? Can you measure the benefits of new processes, methodologies or tools? Can you use historical performance trends to support new project planning initiatives?

QSM’s SLIM-Metrics helps with all your software project performance baselining and benchmarking needs.

SLIM-Metrics works with our SLIM-DataManager data repository application to help you preserve software project histories, assess competitive positions, identify bottlenecks, quantify the benefits of process improvements, and defend future project estimates.

Benchmark your data against industry reference trends from the QSM database of over 13,000 completed software projects–or create your own benchmark trends to use in SLIM-Metrics, SLIM-Estimate, or SLIM-Control.

SLIM-Metrics

Software productivity and performance analytics

 →
SLIM-DataManager
QSM or customer historical software project data
 →
SLIM-Metrics
Software productivity and performance analytics
 →
SLIM-Suite
Statistical trend groups of core performance metrics

How It Fits in the SLIM Ecosystem

Software productivity is one of the two most important inputs to software estimation; the other is software size. Use SLIM-Metrics to generate comprehensive software productivity and benchmark analytics that show project performance ratings, from worst (1 star) to best (5 stars). SLIM-Metrics statistics let you explore and build the predictive models used in SLIM software project estimation and forecasting software.

Data-driven business decisions rely on trustworthy data! SLIM-DataManager is simple to use, yet powerful, equipping you to establish a software metrics program tailored to your needs. Leverage over 300 pre-defined metrics to establish standard and consistent data acquisition process across your organization. SLIM-DataManager’s validation checks, bulk editing features, and data import utility help you ensure confidence.

A leading cause of software project overruns and slippages is that organizations don’t understand how acutely sensitive software development is to management influence. SLIM-Suite applications provide the analytics you need at every stage of the project lifecycle, created with SLIM-Metrics, including both QSM industry trends and your organization’s reference trends.
 

Key Features

Software Metric Regression Trends

  • Create reference trends for each dataset to use in SLIM-Estimate, SLIM-Collaborate, and SLIM-Control as a source of estimation inputs (software size, effort, duration, defects, staff, and productivity) and validation
  • Identify potential outliers and consider excluding them from the reference trend group
  • Benchmark software project performance against industry or organizational trends
four scatter plots showing software size versus duration, effort, peak staff, and avg staff regression trends

Software Productivity Statistics

Accurate measures of software productivity are essential to creating software project estimates and plans. Many development environment characteristics influence productivity, both positively and negatively. Simple statistics provide useful insights.

  • Productivity increases with software size, proven by QSM's Industry Database and trends. Including software size provides the context for proper analysis — the amount of work completed with the time and effort spent.
  • Bar charts display the average or median Productivity Index (PI) for one or more data sets
  • See the range of PI values (min, max) and overall average for a group of projects
  • Use scatter plots to see the correlation between PI and Software Size, and where each project is positioned
Software productivity for multiple projects; average, median, and range

Software Productivity Comparison

Compare software productivity ranges for one or more datasets.

  • Percent of projects at various productivity values within the dataset range
  • Analyze productivity trends that show the average increase in PI with software size and the degree of deviation for each dataset
  • Statistics include the mean, median, quartiles, sample size, sigma, min, and max
Bar chart showing percentage projects for various productivity values; productivity versus software size scatter plot

Five Star Performance Benchmark

The power of the Five Star reports lies in their consideration of the relationship between "core" software metrics (schedule, cost, effort, defects, and productivity) and product size.

Star mappings:

  • 1 star (bottom 20%)
  • 2 star (bottom 20% to 45 %)
  • 3 star (bottom 45% to top 30%)
  • 4 star (top 30% to top 10%)
  • 5 star (top 10%)
software project performance report showing 1 to 5 star ratings for core software metrics

SLIM-Metrics Benefits

Organization project demographics

Understand the influence of project characteristics such as development methods, language, platforms, and application type

Software process improvement

Identify, prioritize, and justify software process improvement initiatives

Custom trendlines

Generate regression trend statistics that represent "average behavior" used in other SLIM-Suite products

Software performance benchmarks

Compare software project performance measures for a given data set to industry or organization reference trends to identify top performers

Request a Demo

Register for a live demo of SLIM to see how data-driven software estimation and analytics can improve the way your organization plans and delivers software projects. During the session, you’ll see how SLIM uses proven models and industry benchmark data to help teams produce more accurate estimates, manage in-flight projects, and conduct post-project analysis.