Fourteenth Lecture Hour 9:30 – 10:20 am, Sunday, September 16 Software Management Disciplines...
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Transcript of Fourteenth Lecture Hour 9:30 – 10:20 am, Sunday, September 16 Software Management Disciplines...
Fourteenth Lecture Hour9:30 – 10:20 am, Sunday,
September 16
Software Management Disciplines
Project Control and Process Automation
(from Part III, Chapter 13 of Royce’ book)
Review –The Four Parts of the Course
• Software Management Renaissance
– The conventional software management process.
– Five improvements to make the waterfall process work.
• A Software Management Process Framework
– Phases
– Artifacts
– Workflows
– Checkpoints
• Software Management Disciplines– Planning– Organization– Automation– Process control and
instrumentation– Tailoring
• Looking Ahead– Modern project profiles– Next-generation software
economics– Modern process transitions
Topics for Today
• Seven Core Metrics
• Management Indicators
• Quality Indicators
• Life Cycle Expectations
• Pragmatic Software Metrics
• Metrics Automation
Basic Themes for Modern Software Management
• Getting design right by architecture first.• Managing risk through iterative development.• Reducing complexity with components-based
techniques.• Making progress and quality tangible through
instrumented change management.• Automating overhead and bookkeeping through
use of round-trip engineering and integrated environment.
Goals of Software Metrics
• An accurate assessment of progress to date.
• Insight into the quality of the evolving software product.
• A basis for estimating the cost and schedule for completion with increasing accuracy over time.
Metrics Characteristics
• They are simple, objective, easy to collect, easy to interpret, and hard to misinterpret.
• Collection can be automated and non-intrusive.
• Assessment is continuous and non-subjective.
• They are useful to both management and engineering personnel for communicating progress and quality in a consistent format.
• Their fidelity improves across the life cycle.
Three Basic Management Metrics
• Technical progress• Financial status• Staffing progress
Financial and staffing metrics are easy. They always have been easy. The real problem is to measure technical progress with objectivity.
Three Progress Metrics• Software architecture team:
– number of use cases demonstrated.
• Software development team: – number of source lines of code under configuration
management– number of change orders closed
• Software assessment team:– Number of change orders opened– Test hours executed– Evaluation criteria met
• Software management team:– Milestones completed.
Staffing and Team Dynamics
• Metric:– percent staffed.
• Metric: staffing momentum– additions versus attrition.
• Glaring indicator of future trouble:– Unplanned attrition. Usually due to personnel
dissatisfaction with management, lack of teamwork, or high probability of failure to meet objectives.
Four Quality Indicators
• Change traffic and stability– Provides insight into stability, convergence toward stability,
predictability of completion
• Breakage and Modularity– Breakage: extent of change needed.– Modularity: average breakage trend over time.
• Rework and Adaptability– Rework: amount of effort needed to fix.– Adaptability: rework trend over time.
• Maturity– Average time between faults.
Quality Indicator Characteristics
• They are derived from the evolving products, not other artifacts.
• They provide insight into waste.• They are dynamic for an iterative process.
Focus is on trends and changes in time.• Combination of current value and trends
provide tangible indicators for effective management action.
Comment on Metrics
• Metrics usually display the effects of problems, not the underlying causes of problems. Reasoning and synthesis are required for solution.
• Although measuring is useful, it doesn’t do any thinking for the decision makers.– Value judgments can not be make by metrics; they must
be left to smarter entities such as software project managers.
• However, metrics can provide data to help ask the right questions, understand the context, and make objective decisions.
Metrics Automation – the Software Project Control Panel
• On-line version of status of artifacts.– Display panel that integrates data. A
“dashboard”.– Display for –
• project manager (overall values)
• test manager (status of an upcoming release)
• Configuration Manager (change traffic)
• etc.
Summary for Project Control and Instrumentation
• Progress toward project goals and quality of products must be measurable.
• The most useful metrics are extracted from the evolving artifacts.
• Management and quality indicators must be used continuously as project proceeds.
• Trends and status measures must be used together.• Technical progress is the most difficult item to
measure.