Overview
To succeed in the software industry, managers need to cultivate a reliable development process. By measuring what teams have achieved on previous projects, managers can more accurately set goals, make bids, and ensure the successful completion of new projects.
Acclaimed long-time collaborators Lawrence H. Putnam and Ware Myers present simple but powerful measurement techniques to help software managers allocate limited resources and track progress.
Drawing new findings from an extensive database of more than 6,300 software projects, the authors demonstrate how readers can control projects with just five core metrics-Time, Effort, Size, Reliability, and Process Productivity. With these metrics, managers can adjust ongoing projects to changing conditions-surprises that would otherwise cause instant failure.
Synopsis
This book shows how to integrate software metrics into the unified software development process with the goal of giving managers more control over the progress of projects and the allocation of department resources. The authors identify five core metrics—schedule time, effort, functionality, reliability, and productivity—and apply the concepts to the estimation and control of a sample project. The approach relies heavily on learning from the results of past projects. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR