Five Core Metrics to Guide your Software Endgames

Bob Galen
Principal Consultant of RGalen Consulting Group, L.L.C.

Background

By its very nature, the Endgame of software projects is a hostile environment. Typical dynamics include tremendous release pressure, continuous bug & requirement discovery, exhausted development teams, frenzied project managers and “crunch mode” – a PC term for overtime.

Testing teams are usually in the thick of this battle and accustomed to these dynamics. However, I don't believe Project Managers are proactive enough in working with their testing teams to understand the change and repair workflows within their projects. Yes, we work hard at managing bug reports, but we can do so much more to influence and focus a projects direction.

In this presentation, you'll learn how Project Managers can focus the entire team on a few key performance metrics to improve the overall endgame experience and increase the probability of delivering on-time. And yes, to also survive yet another Endgame.

Learning Objectives

• How to provide effective traffic direction for the incoming defect “stream”
• Why keywords are a great way to focus project releases
• Highlighting defect repair performance characteristics without alienating development
• How to provide powerful Pareto guidance into project risk areas
• Why developing a set of Metrics Analysis Questions (MAQ's) can help your analysis

Outline

• Introduction
  • Introduce the notion of QA teams as GUIDES not reporters
  • Metrics Analysis Question (MAQ) development
    • Define them – what are they?
    • Give some examples of the sort of questions to ask in different contexts
• 5 Key Metrics
  • For each, define the data to be collected, the MAQ's to ask, and the types of guiding actions to take within the project team
    • Found vs. Fixed (Detecting overall release maturation)
    • High Priority (Detecting application maturation & risk)
    • Project Keywords (Mapping to PM workflows)
    • Defect Transition Progress (Analyzing team capacity)
    • Product Functional Area Distribution (Pareto based guidance - component risk)

Attendees from functional management, project management, software engineering and software testing will benefit by learning a set of techniques and heuristics for successfully reading, influencing, and interpreting their application defect metrics to guide their focus within their project endgames. You should have at least 3 years of experience contributing within technology product development teams.

Biography

Bob Galen is a Principal Consultant of RGalen Consulting Group, L.L.C., based in Cary, North Carolina. Bob has held director, manager and contributor level positions in both software development and quality assurance organizations.  He has nearly 25 years of experience working in a wide variety of domains, from hard real-time systems to web based information systems, at companies including Bayer, Bell & Howell Mail Processing, EMC, Lucent, Unisys and Thomson.

Bob regularly speaks at international conferences (STAR, Software Development, PSQT/PSTT, Better Software, and QAI) and to local organizations on topics related to software development, project management, software testing and team leadership. He is a certified Scrum Master and a member of the Agile Alliance. In 2005 he published the book Software Endgames – Eliminating Defects, Controlling Change and the Countdown to On-Time Delivery with Dorset House. The books' focus is how to successfully finish your software projects.