On Thursday, Oct. 6 at 1:00 PM EDT, QSM will host a webinar focused on the relationship and apparent paradox between software size, productivity, and reliability.

Now, more than ever, software projects need to efficiently deliver reliable software. However, many development plans unintentionally guarantee a less than optimal result. This presentation describes how to maximize value by establishing minimum acceptable reliability and how to take advantage of the apparent paradox between software size and productivity through appropriate selection of team size and schedule duration.

Paul Below has over 25 years' experience in measurement technology, statistical analysis, estimating, forecasting, Lean Six Sigma, and data mining. He serves as a consultant for QSM, providing clients with statistical analysis of operational performance for process improvement and predictability. Mr. Below is a Certified Software Quality Analyst, a past Certified Function Point Specialist, and a Six Sigma Black Belt. He has been a course developer and instructor for Estimating, Lean Six Sigma, Metrics Analysis, Function Point Analysis, as well as statistical analysis in the Masters of Software Engineering program at Seattle University. He has one US patent and two patents pending.

View the replay of this webinar.

We are pleased to announce that QSM has a new SLIM product tour. This online demo shows you how to quickly and easily use SLIM-Estimate to create an estimate validated by industry benchmarks or your own project history. The demo then demonstrates how to negotiate trade-offs and highlights some of the new features of the tool. The product tour also includes SLIM-MasterPlan, which allows you to roll-up multiple estimates and is ideal for iterative and non-iterative developments.

View the new SLIM demo here and tell us what you think!

The next time you call or email QSM for support, you may notice a few unfamiliar names or voices. That's because QSM Research and Support is growing!

The first addition to our team is Katie Costantini. Katie joined QSM as a temporary summer intern in May of this year. We were so delighted by the quality of her work that we recently offered her a full time position at QSM as a Technical Support and Documentation specialist.

Katie Costantini joins QSM Research and Technical Support with three years of customer service experience under her belt. Over the summer, she has been working hard to upgrade our product documentation to a newer platform and format. You'll see some of her work in the next edition of SLIM-Suite manuals and help. She also assisted with the redesign of our new FAQs page and has been helping us revamp our ramp up documentation and processes. Katie graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University cum laude with a B.S. in Economics and a minor in Latin and Roman Studies. Raised in a Marine Corps family (ooh rah!), Katie has lived in California, North Carolina, Virginia, and Cairo, Egypt.

Over the next year, Kate will be working on support documentation and the next update of the QSM database and industry trend lines. Her strong quantitative background and stellar organizational skills are already helping us bring about some exciting changes that we'll be unveiling soon!

The second (chronologically speaking) addition to QSM Research & Support is Laura Zuber:

The QSM Database is the cornerstone of our tools and services, so our clients and prospects often ask for more information regarding the data and types of projects represented. This blog post addresses some frequently asked questions about the QSM Database.

Sources of Data

Since 1978, QSM has collected completed project data from licensed SLIM-Suite^® users and trained QSM consulting staff. Consulting data is also collected by permission during productivity assessment, benchmark, software estimation, project audit, and cost-to-complete engagements. Many projects in our database are subject to non-disclosure agreements but regardless of whether formal agreements are in place, it is our policy to guard the confidentiality and identity of clients who contribute project data. For this reason, QSM releases industry data in summary form to preclude identification of individual projects/companies or disclosure of sensitive business information.

Data Metrics

Our basic metric set focuses on size, time, effort, and defects (SEI Core Metrics) for the Feasibility, Requirements/Design, Code/Test, and Maintenance phases. These core measurements are supplemented by nearly 300 other quantitative and qualitative metrics. Approximately 98% of our projects have time and effort data for the Code and Test phase and 70% have time/effort data for both the R&D and C&T phases.

Productivity is captured via the following metrics:

QSM Productivity Index (PI)
Cost per SLOC or Function Point
SLOC or Function Points per month
SLOC or Function Points per Effort Unit (Months, Hours, Days, Weeks, Years)

Quality data is captured via the following metrics:

If you haven't already done so, now is a great time to check out our new Frequently Asked Questions page!

Over the summer, our Intrepid Support Intern Katie revised, updated, or rewrote over 80 frequently asked questions and we've redesigned the FAQs page to make it easier to use. You can browse FAQs by category or enter search your own custom search terms in the Search box.

Can't find what you're looking for? Just email QSM Support - we'll be happy to assist!

QSM is pleased to announce we have been rapidly growing this year. To accommodate our new consulting services, training offerings, SLIM tool releases, and research projects, QSM has welcomed a wide range of talented and experienced team members.  Here's a brief overview of our recent additions:

Phil Armour joins the QSM Consulting Team with nearly 40 years of software consulting experience. A longtime SLIM trainer and teaming partner, Phil is also the author of The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software and is contributing editor and author of the column “The Business of Software” in Communications of the ACM.

Another familiar face, Laura Zuber, also recently joined the QSM Consulting Team. Laura has 20 years of experience in software development consulting and training, six of which have been with QSM. Prior to coming to QSM, Laura managed software development projects, and served as a senior software process improvement specialist at SAIC. 

A longtime customer of SLIM at Boeing, John Staiger is a distinguished graduate of the Navy War College and Six Sigma Black Belt with over 30 years of experience in program and project management and statistical analysis. John assists with SLIM Training, as well as consulting and research work.

Ware Myers died at home peacefully on Friday afternoon July 22, 2011 after a very short period of increasing frailty.

Many of you do not know Ware Myers.  He and I collaborated on four books and many articles about software measurement, estimating and control.  Most of these writings included both our bylines.

Our collaboration begain in 1980 with a tutorial book for the IEEE Computer Society, Software Cost Estimating and Life-Cycle Control: Getting the Software Numbers.   I wrote the text and pulled together pertinent articles from the field.  Ware, on behalf of the IEEE,  put it together, edited it and made it into a handout book for the COMPSAC 1980 tutorial I presented in Chicago October, 1980.  He then suggested that we do a regular book together because he had become very interested in software estimating and management and was trying to get his Ware Myers Writing Service launched.  

The result of this effort was Measures for Excellence: Reliable Software On Time, Within Budget.  Tom DeMarco wrote the Foreword to this book.  I’d like to quote a little of what he had to say:

“ . . . In the sixties and seventies we were metric novices. We would occasionally gush enthusiasm over the possibility of measuring productivity as lines of code per programmer-day.  And then we would come face to face with any of the absurdities that this definition of productivity led us to “Arrghhhh . . . this stuff is harder than it looks.”

In the eighties, we went back over the same ground, but more carefully. We introduced new metrics and new approaches, specifically some project simulation modeling. We used computers and statistical tools to manage these increasingly large data bases of historical data.

Have you ever been excited to discover a new use for something familiar, like learning that lighter fluid can be used to remove ink stains from your clothes?  I recently discovered a way to leverage the tie between SLIM-Estimate and SLIM-DataManager that I was previously unaware of.  

My limited view of SLIM-DataManager as a tool for historical data and SLIM-Estimate as a tool for software project estimation limited my creativity in applying the rich set of capabilities in the entire SLIM tools suite.  I recently observed a more experienced SLIM user use both tools to model a history project where very little data was available, using both applications.  Here is a description of the situation.

Scenario: 

You have gathered metrics from a completed project to serve as the basis of estimation for your next project.  Software size, lifecycle effort, lifecycle duration (phases 1-3), and defects are known, but you do not have a break out of individual phase data.  How can you best model this project and capture the results in SLIM-DataManager?

Solution A: 

I'm pleased to make available "Beyond the Hype," a presentation that I delivered at the 2011 Practical Software and Systems Measurement Conference.  "Beyond the Hype" is a metrics-based analysis of Agile development that both confirms some “common wisdom” and contains a few surprises.  Does Agile really have higher productivity?  How does Agile quality compare with traditional development?  What are Agile’s demonstrated strengths and weaknesses?  How can you size and track Agile projects?  Using Agile project data from the QSM Database, "Beyond the Hype" addresses these and other questions about Agile.

Read the full presentation here.

On Linked In, Peter Hill reports on current "programming languages of choice" in the ISBSG database:

"Java and C# .Net are now the languages of choice in the projects that the ISBSG receives. COBOL has slumped to 12% (it used to be 38%) and Visual Basic has dropped back to 5% after peaking at 15%."

I thought it might be interesting to find out how the "market share" for popular programming languages has changed over time. The first task was to stratify Business projects from the QSM database into 5 bins using the year the systems were put into production. Only medium and high confidence projects with language data were used. Sample sizes ranged from about 600-1200 projects with most year bins containing around 1000 projects.

For each year bin, I determined the "market share" (% of total projects in each bin) for various programming languages. Each bin spans 5 years (1985-1990, 1990-1995 and so on). 

The durability of COBOL surprised me a bit. The vast majority (>75%) of the COBOL projects put into production between 2005 and 2010 were major/minor enhancements of existing systems or maintenance releases, but despite their dwindling market share, COBOL systems appear to be the Energizer Bunnies of the software world - they just keep going, and going, and going....