Reducing Software Maintenance and Total Ownership Costs
Over 75% of the costs of software are in software maintenance. To address this I (Dan Galorath) participated in a best practices conference held by the IT Metrics & productivity Institute. I was fascinated by Herb Krasner’s presentation on software evolution versus software maintenance.
Herb defined software evolution as the set of activities, both technical and managerial, that ensures that software continues to meet organizational and business objectives in a cost effective way. He further defines evolutionary system types as either having an Imprecise statement of a real-world problem which generally changes over time or a system that becomes part of the world that it models/implement whose acceptance depends entirely on opinion and judgment. Evolutionary is in contrast with a maintenance system where the problem can be completely stated and where a change to the specification defines a new problem and a new system.
Herb Krasner , David Garmus, and Dan Galorath talks all illustrated how the use of metrics and management associated with measurement through both development and maintenance can reduce total ownership costs dramatically.
We then heard from Bob Lawhorn who spoke on how his company, Computer Aid Inc (CAI) actually saves organizations money and increases quality by taking over legacy system maintenance and support. It was one of the most inspiring illustrations on why we should do all this I ever saw. He spoke of taking over these systems with new hires, applying the CAI processes and measurement and reducing customer costs by around 30%. And they have been doing this for over 20 years.
Overall I came away inspired, seeing how software estimation, measurement, process, and real management of software like manufacturing is making a difference.
I will be presenting my talk on reducing total ownership costs several more times this year in partnership with CAI.
Risk Analysis & Conference In the Netherlands
I spent this week with our international group… at two conferences (ISPA / SCEA and SSCAG) in the Netherlands.
There were several excellent papers given by Galorath people as well as many SEER users.
Risk analysis has always been one of my favorite features of SEER. And as the risk analyis community matured the risk gurus asked for the ability to fine tune the risk methodology. I was pleased to hear the results of a risk survey and to see how many people use SEER’s internal risk features. SEER includes internal risk analysis and, for those who want to fine tune risk even more, SEER has an interface to Oracle’s Crystal Ball. The Crystal Ball interface allows users to specify more specific information regarding correlations and other risk details. The Oracle people were also at this conference and were very pleased with the SEER use of Crystal Ball. How are you using SEER’s risk features? Do you use SEER’s Crystal Ball interface?
SEER User Conferences & Innovation Awards
This April, Galorath hosted user conferences in the U.S. and Britain. This was the fourth one in the UK and the first multiple day users conference in the US, replacing the “road shows” we have done in a variety of cities in the past. At these gatherings I go into listening mode because I can learn more from our customers than from anyone else. About 75 percent of the time it was our customers doing the talking, discussing SEER applications, the successes that they’ve had and the obvious and not so obvious problems they’ve encountered and overcome. Both conferences had great turnouts and were successful from every standpoint.
The U.S conference was held at the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, California. With its beautiful harbor views and historic pier, you couldn’t ask for a better setting. The conference in the U.K. was held on the impressive grounds of Bletchley Park, where, during World War Two, English computer scientists and mathematicians went about the business of cracking codes encrypted by the Nazi’s famous Enigma machine. What an appropriate setting for Galorath and its users who also use computers to solve difficult problems!
The conference in England featured innovation awards. One, presented to Mickaël Chicot of Euroclear, a provider of European settlement services for financial transactions. Mickaël and his team took advantage of a SEER feature that allows users to put in their own front-end. In this case they installed an Excel input interface that enables Euroclear users to combine the consistency of what they’d done in the past and advancing the state of their process with the power and rigor of SEER. With this solution even occasional SEER users answer some questions in the front end and end up with a fully planned, staffed, scheduled project in Microsoft project. The paper he presented is fascinating and can be accessed elsewhere on the Galorath Web site.
Another popular feature of both conferences was a breakout session in which we invited our SEER customers to suggest features they’d like to see in updates. So, for those of you who couldn’t attend this year, we would like to hear from you… what are you doing that is unique… how much are you saving…. What features would you like to see?
SEER’s 20th Anniversary and Request for Feedback
Last month marked the 20th anniversary of SEER for Software (SEER-SEM). It was back on the 26th of April 1988 that four of us began development. Some months later our first customer, the United States Air Force Space and Missile Center in Los Angeles signed up for the product. It was twelve years before that, as a young MBA student and software project manager, I first thought about transforming software estimation from an art into an engineering discipline. That first version of SEER-SEM, one of the earliest such applications to be Microsoft Windows-based, consisted of 13 5-1/4 inch floppy discs containing 30,000 lines of code. 12 of these disks were a runtime version of Windows 2.03. That’s a far cry from today’s Version 7.2 which comprises over 200,000 lines!
When word of our unique parametric modeling tool got around, other customers got excited about the Galorath SEER solution. The National Security Agency came in, followed by GTE, and Lockheed. I think that the thing I’m most proud of is that, after two decades, every one of our earliest users is still a Galorath customer.
The reason for the outstanding longevity of our customer relationships is not brand loyalty but pure and simple innovation. SEER-SEM has had 16 major enhancements since 1978. These include the addition of thousands of data points, including an ever-expanding knowledge base and user-friendly features that allow people to size without having to estimate lines of code.
We learned early on that listening to customers and understanding what they liked—and didn’t like—about our product, was the key to producing the best tool in the industry.
But even as we wax nostalgic about our early days, Galorath is looking eagerly and optimistically to the future. We are planning many new enhancements, including a Web-based feature that will enable easier collaboration among users in multiple locations. There are other major improvements in the works as well.
I’ve begun this blog to establish a dialog with the thousands of SEER users who are in over 50 countries around the world. As we envision a SEER-SEM for the next 20 years, what would you like to see?
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