SEER Can Help Corporations Seeking Bailout
Looking at items like the recent case study at Philips and the huge cost savings being achieved at so many SEER customers begs the question “how can SEER help companies seeking bailouts” Since SEER can reduce costs by a third or more is many situations, going through existing products and those in the pipeline with SEER can identify major labor and material savings. SEER can also show the costs, schedules, risks of getting disparate IT systems working together, and even the cost of change.
Function Point Simple Introduction
I keep meaning to post Galorath’s Ton Dekker concise introduction to Function Points. Ton is an expert in IFPUG Function points as well as COSMIC Function Points and a host of other functional sizing measures. I always appreciate Ton’s simple and clear approaches.
Step Five: Prepare Baseline Estimate
Budget and schedule are derived from estimates, so if an estimate is not accurate, the resulting schedules and budgets are likely to be inaccurate also. Given the importance of the estimation task, developers who want to improve their software estimation skills should understand and embrace some basic practices. First, trained, experienced, and skilled people should be assigned to size the software and prepare the estimates. Second, it is critically important that they be given the proper technology and tools. And third, the project manager must define and implement a mature, documented, and repeatable estimation process.
To prepare the baseline estimate there are various approaches that can be used, including guessing (which is not recommended), using existing productivity data exclusively, the bottom-up approach, expert judgment, and cost models.
Software Productivity Laws
These laws of software productivity help explain the dynamics of an engineering development project, and they illustrate some of the reasons that just using productivity to estimate is inadequate.
Law 1 - Smaller teams are more efficient. The smaller the team, the higher the productivity of each individual person.
Law 2 - Some schedule compression can be bought. Adding people to a project, to a point, decreases the time and increases the cost as larger teams work together.
Law 3 - Every project has a minimum time. There is an incremental person who consumes more energy than he or she produces. Team size beyond this point decreases productivity and increases time. (Law 3 is also known as Brooks’ law.)
1990 IEEE Article On Measurement
I forgot about this article published on IEEE in 1990.. sizing, metrics, measurement.. lessons learned and forecasting the future… The Ada programming language may be only a memory but some things never change. Viewing the article requires electronic access to the IEEE library. I loook forward to comparing these lessons learned with the 2008 lessons learned briefing from Galorath (Bob Hunt Author)
| Ada sizing, metrics and measures-learning from the past andforecasting the future Galorath, D.D. McRitchie, K. Rampton, J.C. Galorath Associates Inc., Marina del Rey, CA; This paper appears in: Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, 1990. IMTC-90. Conference Record., 7th IEEE |
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| Abstract It is noted that Ada has met with mixed successes owing to both differences in the technology applied to the program and differences in line counting and productivity measurement. The authors discuss the various technologies attributed to Ada and demonstrate methods of Ada size and productivity measurement that are appropriate for Ada and consistent with past data |
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http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel2/105/2373/00066027.pdf?arnumber=66027
SEER Estimate By Comparison Professional Released To All Users
The SEER Estimate By Comparison (formerly SEER-AccuScope) comes in two flavors, the core and the professional. The professional version allows estimation of anything, such as
- total system cost
- software size
- hardware weight
- system value
- server capacity
- best choice from a set of alternatives
This new feature incorporates sophisticated mathematics for uncertainty and estimation.
For the first year Galorath is providing the professional version to all SEER users. Beginning the second year the professional functionality will be available as an upgrade.
Galorath recommends using an industrial strength database for an enterprise but will allow Microsoft Access for simple desktop installations.
This feature began shipping with the release of SEER for Software 7.3, in October, 2008.
Open Source Software Is Not Free
There is a great BLOG entry from someone who went back to Microsoft after a year at Google. Some of his observations are very relevant to the use of open source software. He points out that at Google there is little of project management or testing.
“On the other hand, I was using Google software… there’s just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.”
I know it drives me crazy when software that worked last week suddenly doesn’t. Of course the same thing happens to some extent when my Windows system kindly updates itself each week. Read more
The Risk of Statistical Risk
I was at the SCEA (Society of Cost Estimation and Analysis) conference this week. Some of the buzz was about risk, both talks given at the conference and the ongoing risk arguments. For several years the risk gurus have been lining up to show how to do more robust risk analysis. While I would not say they are getting carried away I would say i get concerned with the differences of opinion and the numerous options provided by smart people.
One of my heroes in risk, Dr. Steve Book or MCR points out that risk analysis should include correlation.
One of my other risk heroes, Evin Stump (of Galorath), points out that defining correlation properly for a work breakdown of any size can involve of thousands of correlation entries. For example a 500 element WBS has 124, 500 correlations and a 1000 element WBS has 499,000 correlations. Dr. Book doesn’t point that out but he does say “use .2″ That solves the hundreds of thousands of correlations issue. But according to Evin that doesn’t provide more accurate risk analysis. Evin points out “if two or more risky items are not statistically independent, a Monte Carlo simulation that fails to account for their correlation will underestimate their combined risk” He then asks “what if you overestimate correlation?” Hmmm could it be that .2 correlations could overestimate some systems. Evin also points out how difficult it is to actually determine correlation…. For example, what is the correlation between a light bulb and a light bulb on/off switch… Probably near zero but most people would be tempted to assign a high correlation. Read more
10 Step Estimation Process Overview
Viable estimation is critical to successful software projects whether it is agile, waterfall, or anything in-between. In the book “Software Sizing, Estimation, and Risk Management: Where Performance is Measured Performance Improves” we lay out the process. This can be used in a formal way for high maturity organizations AND can be used as a general basis of organizations just getting started in improved planning. There are many documents and presentations available from Galorath on this topic. I find the IBM paper by Dr. Denton Tarbet of Galorath an interesting visual representation. And a short summary of the process is included as this link. Read more
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?
