LiveMeeting Training on Cost Effectiveness, Siemens India

July 26, 2010toJuly 30, 2010

Conducted over LiveMeeting for Siemens AG — Gurgaon, Kolkata, Bangalore, Pune, India

Here is a related post about this event.

Materials for Participants

Evaluating Software Development and Process Improvement Initiatives

with Hakan Erdogmus

July 26-30, 2010 –  8h00-10h00 through LiveMeeting
In times of economic turmoil, cost effectiveness and productivity in software development is more important than ever. This tutorial will discuss quantitative approaches for evaluating new software development initiatives and cost effectiveness of introducing new engineering approaches. It will share concrete case examples situated in a typical context. It will identify and explain the best practices in this topic area. Questions addressed will include: What factors influence the value of a new software development initiative in an uncertain environment? How to account for those factors in project valuation for business case analysis and making a go/no-go decision? Why is it important to structure projects in an iterative and incremental manner? How to gauge the  productivity and quality impacts of introducing a new software development practice, such as pair programming and test-driven development? How to pilot new approaches in order to evaluate their cost effectiveness? How to evaluate the rolled-up financial benefits of such software process improvements?This event will serve as a platform to establish a continuous dialog for software engineering economics as a means to facilitate the dialog between engineering staff and R&D management in contexts where software development is a core activity and software process improvement plays an important strategic role.
Objectives

  • Demonstrate how to combine empirical and analytical approaches to obtain statements on the benefits of software process improvement activities
  • Illustrate how to value software projects structured in particular ways and subject to uncertainty
  • Share challenges and best practices in software engineering economics
  • Emphasize the role of experimentation and piloting in process improvement
  • Discuss ways to motivate senior management to fund uncertain software projects and software process improvement activities
Key Messages

  • Flexibility adds value to software development projects
  •  Cost-benefit methods help to prioritize process improvement activities
  • Quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness of process improvement necessitate collection of proper data and information from inside and outside the organization
  • The core methods used to evaluate the feasibility of software projects and process improvement activities are not new – they are financial and economics-based methods well-known in many other industries, but applied in the information technology context with proper adaptations
  • Experimentation and piloting are central to process improvement
ContentTo provide continuity, the workshop will use a common context for all case studies and examples used to illustrate the introduced techniques and concepts. The common context is that of MedSoft, a fictitious small, privately owned health-informatics company based in the US. MedSoft is representative of technology companies operating under multiple sources of uncertainty, subject to high technology and market risk, and whose profitability is sensitive to the internal software production processes used. It is also representative of a business unit of a large organization, publicly owned or private. MedSoft develops software application services for the health care sector, hosts these applications, and provides value-added information services. It has been founded 5 years ago and has been profitable for the last 3 years. MedSoft has a number of new ventures in its pipeline that it’s planning to launch in the near future. MedSoft is also actively looking for new ways to improve its software development processes, scanning the environment for emerging practices and techniques, following the latest research on relevant practices and techniques, and evaluating and anticipating their effectiveness in their own context.Part I: Project Valuation and Structuring

  • Principles of project valuation
  • Time value of money, risk, and discounting
  • Net Present Value
  • Structuring projects for increased flexibility and value generation
  • Economics of flexibility, staging, and incremental and iterative development
  • The option value of a flexible project
  • Sensitivity and break-even analysis

Part II: Evaluating Process Improvement

  • Basic concepts
  • Cost avoidance vs. savings, soft vs. hard benefits
  • Types of raw data to be collected
  • Levels of process evaluation proxies: measures, metrics, indicators
  • Relative vs. absolute proxies
  • Nominal vs. real productivity
  • Designing pilots
  • Process measurement pitfalls and trade-offs
  • Common interpretative mistakes
Target AudienceThe workshop is designed for practitioners involved in software development projects and process initiatives in leadership, consulting, and decision making roles. The target audience includes:

  • Software project managers developing revenue-generating products or services
  • Software project managers creating business cases for new projects or process improvements initiatives
  • Functional managers making technical and process decisions based on economic feasibility
  • Process improvement experts
  • Quality managers making resource allocation decisions or introducing new practices
  • Heads of process teams and software engineering process groups
  • Corporate and internal consultants acting in advisory roles in software projects and process improvement initiatives
Tutorial PresenterDr. Hakan Erdogmus,  Kalemun Research Inc., Ottawa, CanadaBiography: Hakan Erdogmus operates a software engineering research and consultancy service based in Ottawa, Canada. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary’s Department of Computer Science, where he teaches graduate courses on software economics. From January 1995 to June 2009, Dr. Erdogmus worked for the Canadian National Research Council’s Institute for Information Technology, where he led the Agile and Collaborative Practices and Software Economics research threads in the Software Engineering Group. He published and presented extensively on both topics. Before joining NRC, Hakan was a research associate at INRS-Télécommunications, Montreal. He co-edited Advances in Software Engineering: Comprehension, Evaluation and Evolution and Value-Based Software Engineering, both published by Springer. Hakan obtained his Ph.D. degree in Telecommunications from Université du Québec’s Institut national de la recherche scientifique (Montreal, 1994), his M.Sc. degree from McGill University’s School of Computer Science (Montreal, 1989), and his B.Sc. degree  from Bogaziçi University’s Computer Engineering Department (Istanbul, 1986). He is a senior member of IEEE and IEEE Computer Society, a member of ACM, and an incoming board member of the Agile Alliance (2010-2011 term). Hakan is a recipient of the Eugene L. Grant Award given by the Engineering Economy division of the American Society for Engineering Education. He has been serving as the Editor in Chief of IEEE Software since 2007. Hakan was the general chair of the 11th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP2010) and is the general chair of the Agile 2011 Conference.
July 30th, 2010 | Category: Empirical Software Engineering, Events, Software Economics, Software Measurement, Software Process, Talks & Presentations, Upcoming Events | Comments are closed

Comments are closed.