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Questioning Measurement When we consciously measure something, we try to measure precisely and often assume that our measurements are accurate and useful. However, software development and testing activities are not subject to the same kinds of quantitative measurements and precise predictions we find in physics. Instead, our work is like the social sciences, in which complex interactions between people and systems make measurement difficult and precise prediction impossible. Michael Bolton argues that all is not lost. It is possible and surprisingly straightforward to measure development and testing accurately and usefully–even if not precisely. You can measure how much time is spent on test design and execution compared with time spent on interruptions, track coverage obtained for each product area, and more.
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Michael Bolton, DevelopSense
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The Net Promoter Score: Measure and Enhance Software Quality Would you like to know–prior to release–how your customers will perceive product quality? Employing the Net Promoter Score (NPS) technique, Anu Kak shares a strategy he has successfully used to provide this information and, at the same time, help improve actual product quality. Today, many organizations are using NPS for their production products to identify customers who are most likely to be either promoters or detractors. This measurement tool provides the information needed to prioritize product fixes and enhancements. Anu shares his experiences applying NPS within software product development to enhance quality before release. He explains the step-by-step implementation of NPS within software engineering. Learn how to read and analyze NPS feedback and implement an NPS-centric process to enhance product quality. Take back a road map to evangelize NPS adoption among the stakeholders in your organization.
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Anu Kak, PayPal, Inc.
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Managing with Metrics Many consider metrics a thorn in the side of software test and development efforts. However, when used properly, metrics offer critical insight into underlying issues within projects. In addition, metrics can provide vital real-time information for strategic and tactical project adjustments. Based on his experiences during a major acceptance test project within a lengthy ERP implementation, Shaun Bradshaw demonstrates how an optimal set of test metrics steered the effort toward success. Shaun shares key metrics to track progress and test coverage that enabled their test and management decisions and describes ways these same metrics can benefit your organization. Learn how to implement these valuable indicators and how to relay this information up the management chain in easily comprehensible forms. Take home a set of valuable metrics you can implement quickly to give yourself the upper hand in future testing efforts.
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Shaun Bradshaw, Zenergy Technologies
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Meaningful Metrics for Agile Teams and Organizations The old adage “If you can measure it, you can manage it” also implies that meaningless metrics lead to meaningless management and harmful metrics lead to harmful management. When agile methods encounter metrics that were designed-and have organizational credibility-for non-agile processes and practices, the potential for harm is great. Niel Nickolaisen shares case studies and examples to describe the principles of meaningful-and meaningless or harmful-agile metrics. Meaningful metrics favor accomplishment over activity, measure processes rather than people, communicate clearly, and adjust to fit changing conditions. Filtering our agile metrics through these principles yields dramatic improvements in how we manage and deliver projects and services. For example, what positive and negative behaviors do burndown charts drive?
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Niel Nickolaisen, Energy Solutions
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The Test Manager's Dashboard: Making It Accurate and Relevant Gathering and presenting clear information about quality-both product and process-may be the most important part of the test manager's job. Join Lloyd Roden as he challenges your current progress reports-probably full of lots of difficult-to-understand numbers-and asks you to replace the reports with a custom Test Manager's Dashboard containing a series of graphs and charts with clear visual displays. Your dashboard needs to report quality and progress status that is accurate, useful, easily understood, predictive, and relevant. Learn about Lloyd's favorite dashboard graphs-test efficiency, risk progress, quality targets, and specific measures of the test team's well being. Learn to correlate and interpret the various types of dashboard data to reveal the complete picture of the project and test progress.
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Lloyd Roden, Grove Consultants
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A Customer-driven Approach to Software Metrics In their drive to delight customers, organizations initiate testing and quality improvement programs and define metrics to measure their success. In many cases, we see organizations declare success even though their customers do not see much improvement in either products of services. Wenje Lai and J.P. Chen share their approach of identifying quality improvement needs and defining the appropriate metrics that link improvement goals to customer experiences. As a result, the resources allocated to internal quality improvement efforts maximize the value to the business. Their approach is a simple three-step procedure that any test or development organization can easily adopt. It starts with using customer survey data to understand the organization’s customer pain points and ends with identifying the metrics that are linked to the customer experience and actionable by development and test teams inside the organization.
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Wenje Lai, Cisco Systems
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Eliminating Process Bottlenecks: The Theory of Constraints Managers often fall into the trap of making sure that everyone is busy. It seems logical that we should keep all of our highly paid “resources” (ouch!) fully utilized. Surprisingly, optimizing for maximum utilization (busyness) actually creates less business value. Not surprisingly, it also can lead to quality problems, lowered job satisfaction, and even burnout. Join Chris Sims for this experiential session about the Theory of Constraints in which we explore better ways of optimizing how teams work. We will launch a fictitious aerospace company, build airplanes (albeit paper ones), and track our financial results. We'll apply the “Five Focusing Steps” from the Theory of Constraints: identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate, and repeat. We'll devise a process to evolve and improve our efficiency, our satisfaction in a job well done, and, ultimately, our profitability.
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Chris Sims, Agile Learning Labs
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Is It Good Enough To Ship? Predicting Software Quality Software quality often gets lots of lip service and little else-until its absence triggers a disaster and stuff hits the wall. Don Beckett shares work he did to determine when the software for a satellite destined to orbit the earth was sufficiently stable to risk being launched. Failure would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Don shows how he modeled this problem to answer the “launch/don't launch” question. Beginning with an analysis of the factors that determine acceptable quality and the issues that confront defect collection, Don overviews how defect discovery follows a Rayleigh curve distribution that anyone can use for predicting defects remaining in a system. He shares a model of how staffing and scheduling trade-offs will almost certainly impact defect creation rates.
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Donald Beckett, Quantitative Software Management
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Measurement Problems that Plague Us Measurement problems in software organizations are many: challenges with effort tracking; difficulties motivating the workforce to comply; resource management in multitasking and matrix organizations; attempts to "standardize" project status reporting or dashboards that run amuck; the misconceptions that fester and hinder defect collection and analysis throughout the life cycle; and management’s failure to truly understand and actually use measurement data and information to make decisions. Beth Layman reviews these thorny and recurring measurement problems-problems that plague even those organizations with established measurement cultures. She provides case studies of the problems and discusses their typical root causes. Beth concludes with practical advice on what it takes to institutionalize valuable, workable measurement practices within your organization.
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Beth Layman, Layman & Layman
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Five Core Metrics to Guide Software Project Endgames By its very nature, the endgame of software projects is a hostile environment. Typical dynamics include tremendous release pressure, continual bug and requirement discovery, exhausted development teams, frenzied project managers, and “crunch mode” for testers. However, hope and relief are available. By using metrics derived from defect discovery and repair patterns, you can learn how to guide projects toward a successful release with less stress and more certainty. Bob Galen shares patterns that you can mine from your defect metrics to focus your entire team on a few key performance indicators. Examine defect patterns, maturation rates, and other organizationally unique patterns that you can leverage as project milestones. Learn about the Pareto Principle and its implications on defect actions and workflow. Next time, you’ll be better prepared for your project endgame and increase the likelihood of an on-time delivery.
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Bob Galen, iContact
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