Software Development Metrics At Galorath: Co-located Teams Are Still Most Efficient

June 20, 2008 · Filed Under General  - 0 Comment(s)

Our Development Vice President, Karen McRitchie and myself had an interesting review of development productivity in our own organization. Very interesting, but no surprises.

She found that the most productive projects are those where the team is co-located. There is a productivity hit when the team is geographically disbursed. Of course SEER for Software estimates reflect this with their multiple site parameter. But some people, even within Galorath, attempt to deny this phenomenon.

She found the productivity is higher on newer projects, ones where innovation doesn’t require enhancements and retest of large blocks of preexisting code. Again this is exactly what SEER for Software predicts. And we know that as these projects go from version 1 to version 2 to version n productivity will degrade even more. This is yet another indicator that organizations that just use a standard productivity number, independent of the project specifics cannot estimate well.

SO here we are, Galorath along with the rest of the software development community… The world is flat. We have people in diverse locations in the western US and even in Bulgaria and India. Our teams work well. And the most efficient are those where people can meet at the whiteboard or the water cooler… Where they can go to lunch and discuss a problem. This is very much in-line with the findings at the Rational User Conference.

In the information included below these are hand generated lines of code only. Auto-generated code is not counted.

The Effective Technology is the propensity for productivity from SEER for Software. Higher is better. SEER for Software (SEER-SEM) has the most geographically disbursed team and has the most preexisting code. This is largely responsible for the the lower productivity. SEER-SEM Basic Equations

So.. collaboration software, we couldn’t do this at all without it. But it isn’t like being in the same room. (One of our people likes to think that a video teleconference makes it seem more like being together. It drives me crazy. I watch the delays in the transmission, think of the bandwidth waste and generally become less productive myself when such technology is used for technical reviews.

Main Executable Only, Add-Ins not included in size.

Project
Effective Technology
Total Size
Eff Size
Act Prod
  
SEER-IT 1.1.0
11,608
47,108
47,108
1,140
NearLoc
SEER-H 7.1
6,799
155,885
15,384
509
NearLoc
SEER-SEM 7.2
3,164
151,104
10,754
401
Disbursed
SEER-SEM 7.3
3,278
151,801
4,940
368
Disbursed
SEER-MFG 6.0
7,365
128,047
22,156
1,194
CoLoc
SEER-Accuscope 3.0
15,305
19,870
12,362
1,528
CoLoc
   
   
     
   
   
       
       
     


Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.

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