program selection system

Join Michael Mah (Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium and Managing Partner at QSM Associates) and Zach Nies (VP of Products at Rally) to learn about a landmark study that resulted in unprecedented quality and productivity metrics for several major Agile initiatives.

You will learn:

• How Agile projects fared in terms of speed, efficiency, quality and cost • What the benchmark findings revealed against a database of 7,000+ primarily traditional development projects • How your team can use Rally and QSM SLIM models to make measurement easy

Management loves the idea of metrics. Project teams, though, hate it: no one likes to be examined like a bug under a magnifying glass. It’s such a shame that this is the perception, because constructive metrics are a project team’s best defense against insanity. When well done, metrics practice is like the martial art of Aikido, which uses an opponents own energy and momentum - and in this case self-interest and responsibilities - to overcome them. This course explores constructive metrics at the release level that can be used as leading indicators.

Metrics can backfire. They are useful for both self assessment and retrospectives. But experience since 2002 with 80 teams at IBM has shown it’s not just a matter of finding the right metrics. It’s important to use them properly, and avoid common pitfalls, including bloated metrics, the evil scorecard, lessons forgotten, forcing process, and inconsistent sharing. Turning assessments into “un-assessments” returns power back to the team. Instead of defining more metrics, this paper tells how not to misuse them.

This experience report outlines technical lessons learned over a several year period across several projects within an organisation which aggressively applied most of the agile practices with much success. The success, however, was not been achieved without challenges and lessons learned along the way. This paper outlines the interesting observations we made while trying to turn the agile dials to eleven. Our starting assumption when we began this journey several years ago was that productivity and quality were opposing forces; you had to trade one off against the other. However, after turning the dials to eleven, we now believe that you can much more of both than we previously thought possible. In fact, we believe that applying the practices outlined in this experience report allow both much higher quality and higher productivity than traditional development.

I’ve been told that “everyone knows” that code written TDD is simpler than code written otherwise. But is that really true? And how could we tell? And what would it really mean anyway? I’ve found a metric, intimately related to complexity, that correlates very well with whether or not code comes with automated unit tests. It also looks a lot as if it correlates somehow with the degree of TDD-ness applied. Come see it in action, learn how it works, and contribute to the on-going investigation!

An updated and improved version of this session from last year (also exhibited at Spa and XPDay).

What are the factors critical to the success of a CIO? Which relationships are the most important in determining the longevity of a CIO? How can a CIO consistently deliver business value? How can development teams in general and agile teams in particular contribute to this success? In this presentation, Niel Nickolaisen shares his experiences and the survey responses from his CIO peers on how the development team and CIO can work hand in hand to improve IT and business performance.

The software development industry has a poor track record for developing and employing effective metrics. Most of the metrics employed are tangential to the true goal of software development (which is delivering business value) and are thus ill-regarded by developers, especially agile developers.

However, good metrics are important to management, in order to understand status and progress of their teams, and to make projections into the future. Therefore, we must provide meaningful metrics that give useful information to the business — but also enforce agile values.

Value Statement:

The community will learn 10 valuable tips that have been distilled from a decade of helping people transition to agile methods.

Abstract:

What do code and methodology have to do with one another? Everything! This session is a survey of tools and metrics that allow you to determine the quality of your code along with strategies to “wire it” into your agile project. I talk about the Hawthorne effect, analysis tools, useful metrics, tools for generating metrics, and how to analyze raw data into actionable tasks.The metrics I cover include: cyclomatic complexity, efferent and afferent coupling, the Chidamber/Kemerer metrics suite, CRAP4J, and all the metrics covered by Panopticode.