HOW ARE WE DOING? NOT HOW DID WE DO?

This book is intended for software project managers and development staff who want to use software measurement as a “real-time” performance indicator. The measures presented here will help you answer questions such as:

• Are we on track, and if not, can we get back on track?

• Are the effort estimates accurate? If not, how inaccurate are they?

• Are the estimates accurate but the workload greater than expected?

• How can we plan, in advance, the effort required to fix defects when we don’t know how many there will be or when they will appear?

• Can the data coming from the test group help us estimate more accurately when we’ll be finished?

This book presents a “bottom-up” approach to software measurement. It identifies the key measures and shows you what they can (and cannot) tell you about the status of your product and schedule. It focuses on interpreting data to avoid surprises, not on process control. I don’t talk about statistical process control because I’m assuming that most readers won’t have any defined and consistently followed processes. Nor is there anything about creating metrics dashboards or scorecards, because I’m assuming that no one in your boardroom cares.

Yet.

And that’s an important qualifier. Software project managers and their harried development teams often have to be change agents in an environment that sees no need for change, only more effort. But quantitative data on software products and project performance, however rudimentary or imprecise, is the Archimedes lever that can move the earth. What you learn here will help you convince the rest of the business that quantitative software management really can improve the bottom line.

The chapters that follow will show you how to design and position a measurement effort in the business as a whole, what measures you should implement, how to interpret the results of your measurements, and how to apply that knowledge to solve some typical challenges in software development. With a problem-tracking system and the help of your team, you can collect, analyze, and apply all these measures with relatively little effort, in a relatively short time, and without any tools other than a spreadsheet program.