Optimizing IT or Engineering In Tough Economic Times Through SEER
When economic times get tough one of the most difficult things for management is to determine the impact of slowed or killed projects, the impacts on maintenance, and further methods of achieving time to market with fewer resources.
Sterling Commerce in a presentation called “What’s Real Answers For Tough Time” pointed out some of the challenges and issues in the new consolidated banking, finance and other industries. The legacy is difficult including:
- Fragmented, Incompatible, Fragmented, Siloed Systems For the Pre-Acquisition Assets, and cost prohibitive to replace systems
- Difficult To Process new customers due to disparate systems
- Incompatible / Incomplete Business Processes so no one knows the status of customers
The article also pointed out that some organizations will just not spend any money while others will make the decisions and spend the money to have them emerge stronger. That article’s subtitle was “A Crystal Ball Wont Provide the Answers Your Need” While I agree with the challenges listed by Sterling, I believe that a sort of Crystal Ball… SEER can identify the effects of decisions on business.
Costs & Benefits of Software Quality
Rick Spiewak from The MITRE Corporation and Karen McRitchie, Galorath VP of development published a paper in the Crosstalk journal showing how increasing quality using basic quality principals during software development can reduce costs while also reducing defects. The abstract follows:
“Software can be considered a product whose production is fundamentally similar to other products. Improving the quality of software can be approached using the same basic principles espoused by quality pioneers such as W. Edwards Deming, Philip B. Crosby and Harold F. Dodge. These principles can form a practical framework for ensuring that appropriate requirements are set for software development projects. By connecting established software engineering practices to the objective of defect prevention, we can apply the principles of quality management to software development. Using modeling techniques, it is possible to predict the potential cost savings and defect reduction expected”.
Real Time IT Budgets Versus Annual Budgets
Interesting article on Eweek. “That elusive IT budget is more elusive than ever. It looks to me like the idea of the yearly budget is totally trashed in favor of a real time budget, updated all the time and as fluid as the economic news of the day. That may not be the best way to get projects moving and completed on time, but it is the current reality.”
All the more reason to understand the realities of projects and the cost / benefits of starts and stops with SEER.
New SEER Functionality, Like a Kid in a Candy Store
It is interesting as the company has grown over the years and as i have gotten further and further from day to day software requirements and design, to see some of the amazing functionality coming out of our development group. Sometimes it makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.
I was struck by the newest version of the metrics and benchmarking. A Histogram in addition to a scatter plot. This is so handy. And nearly a surprise to me. (I did know they were doing it but didn’t see it until beta time)
I see some of the global estimation abilities that have gone into SEER for Hardware Electronics and Systems. Very nice!!!. Makes trades even faster. And these I didnt know about until they were in the shipping product.
For SEER for IT, the newest scenario functionality is beautifully executed. Generate an entire IT system estimate by using a pattern and answering a few questions. I never saw this improved version until release.
And the Far out project… estimates unmanned spacecraft far out into the future. i just played with it a few weeks ago. It was released months ago. Very interesting.
Even some of our unreleased projects such as xippr (code name, ask and you can find out details) Amazing in its ability to ferret out project issues and potential problems.
And our top secret project… Amazing as I occasionally get glimpses into the builds.
As our processes continue to tighten (ISO 9001:2000 review coming up next month) I will be invited to attend more reviews… some of the fun surprises will disappear for me. I love seeing SEER evolve. Hats off to the development group.
COTS Components in Software Development Are Not Without Effort or Risk
I have lost count of how many project that used COTS (commercial off the shelf software) components thinking they were saving huge development expense where the COTS itself was the cause of project failure.
I recall, some time ago when a super object oriented database was going to save the day, cutting development cost dramatically and exceeding requirements. Only problem is that software didn’t work. And the developer didn’t have source to fix it. And the design was wrong. And On and on.
In a less dramatic sense I look at the seemingly risk free use of COTS components of a small magnitude. For example we used a package that was an excel like plug-in one time for our custom calcs. The vendor went out of business and we lost support. We had to redevelop (this time we used real Excel) but it cost months of development work, and changes to user configurations, and technical support challenges.
And people often forget about testing of the COTS components. They will impact test effort (if you assume they just work you are likely in for a sifnificant project surprise)
Then there is the IT support of a deployed system. Your users dont care if the software is COTS, not developed by you. They want support for the system with its whole mission.
And just the cost of choosing the right (hopefully) COTS software. SEER for Software captures all these costs and risks.
Northrop published a case study showing of SEER-SEM and its COTS abilities: ”the results were remarkable”
SEER for Software’s COTS functionality provides estimates of the effort to choose, use, and deploy COTS software.
Improving Productivity By Reducing Rework
Bob Longhorn of CAI gave a masterful talk describing how the cost of rework can be killing software projects and how reducing rework could be the quickest way to improved productivity. Bob defined rework not as I normally do (redesign, reimplementation, retest of existing software to add functionality) but as the amount of churn, the rework of fixing things that were not done properly the first time in a development project. I believe Bob said many organizations have 30% of this rework and he say at least 1 organization with 70% rework.
That says that improved processes and reviews could improve productivity by 30% just about all by themselves.
Even at Galorath I see rework at times that could have been avoided by reviews and verification that review changes were made. We all know it is many times less expensive to fix a problem up front than when the software is in test. Yes, we have processes, but sometimes that extra review just doesn’t happen due to perceived time constraints.
It is a shame so many organizations think they don’t have time for reviews. They don’t have time not to have them.
Bob says (correctly) that experimentation and prototyping are NOT rework. and that every deliverable should be inspected before declaring it complete. Quoting Bob “”Nothing Will Provide A More Significant Improvement in productivity Than Improved Quality”
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.
Over 4000 Raw Datapoints Available To SEER for Software Via ISBSG
Galorath and ISBSG have partnered to provide SEER users with access to the ISBSG database. ISBSG is a data repository ” The global and independent source of data and analysis for the IT industry” with over 4000 datapoints. These datapoints can be used within SEER’s Benchmarking and Metrics as well as its comparison sizing, knowledge base selection and training SEER’s crosscheck (secondary data driven estimate) capability. The following screen captures just touch the surface of the capabilities. Ton Dekkers of Galorath and past president of ISBSG explains how the two work together in the Galorath recorded webinar. Skip the first 15 minutes if you can.
Estimating The Cost of Software Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V)
Since IV&V is a level of effort activity (purchase a much as you want) people can buy as much or as little as the want as a level of effort activity. IV&V is not estimated out of the box with SEER-SEM since it is not part of the development itself. Of course some people calibrate in IV&V practices from their organization.
Of course more critical systems would might have more IV&V than less critical ones (which need none) One customer with severe security issues spend about 40% on top of development for IV&V.
Full IV&V is not just independent testing but is an independent look at requirements sufficiency and traceability, design, coding, and testing as well as independent text.
A Titan briefing on the internet showed IV&V as 35 to 45% http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/systems/Rogers2.pdf
The book “Independent Verification and Validation By Robert O. Lewis”
shows IV&V being up to 18% of software development cost.
Wallace and Fuji (1989) report mixed results on the effectiveness of independent verification and validation (IV&V), largely due to the fact that IV&V adds 10 to 30 percent to development costs while saving 0 to 180% of IV&V costs.
Estimating Systems Engineering…. The Upcoming Book.. and SEER
I had the opportunity to review Dr. Ricardo Valerdi’s (MIT) upcoming book on the COSYSMO model for estimating systems engineering: Systems Engineering Cost Estimation with COSYSMO. There were some real gems in it.
From the book: ‘It is known that increasing front-end analysis reduces the probability of problems later on (Blanchard and Fabrycky 1998) but excessive front end analysis may not pay the anticipated dividends. The key to accurately estimating early in a program is to estimate the appropriate level of systems engineering in order to ensure system success within cost and schedule budgets’ This chart is included showing a relationship of systems engineering effort. Of course COSYSMO is a model for estimating systems engineering effort parametrically.
Galorath is proud to offer an implementation of COSYSMO for those desiring that methodology for systems engineering.
The SEER Allocation handles much more:
Additionally, for complex systems Our SEER for hardware, Electronics, and Systems estimates for software, hardware and the total system: 1) systems engineering, 2) systems program management, 3) integration Assembly & systems test / 4) System support equipment. SEER-H’s organization is summarized as follows:
