Things Software » Software Economics

Software Experts Summit

Hakan — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:33:36 +0000

June 26, 2012

British Computer Society, London, UK

Software Experts Summit

sponsored by IEEE Software

Valencia Talk

Hakan — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 13:31:40 +0000

November 17, 2011

Creating Value with Software Process

Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

EMSE Course at UPM

Hakan — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:13:44 +0000

October 11, 2011

January 18, 2012

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

The European Master of Software Engineering (EMSE ) is a joint graduate-level degree offered by four European Universities. EMSE is awarded every year with grants from the European Union through its Erasmus Mundus Program which promotes higher education excellence. The Erasmus Mundus Program funds cooperation among academics through the invitation of non-European professors to teach at one of the participating universities for a duration of up to four months.

How to Evaluate Cost-Effectiveness of Software Projects and Process Improvement

Hakan — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:29:32 +0000

Today I finished a training course for Siemens India on cost effectiveness of software development projects and process improvement initiatives. The course was conducted over LiveMeeting in 5 consecutive days. 23 people from 4 different locations participated in the training. We covered basic techniques for evaluating cost-effectiveness, such as NPV and Real Productivity, and worked out several examples. Part I focused on Project Valuation and Part II focused on Process Improvement. Each day’s session started with a check-in that addressed outstanding items, reviewed concepts, and discussed solutions to take-home exercises from the previous session.

As the common context, I used that of a mid-sized organization in the health informatics sector with new ventures in its project pipeline and with several new ideas for improving its software processes. The examples were mostly drawn from this context and organized as HBR style cases. The cases addressed project staging, incremental development, pair programming, code inspections, role of evidence, and test-driven development.

The event was a repeat of an earlier course I gave in June for for Siemens in Erlangen, Germany. But I changed the materials and format significantly to fit the new interaction style and in response to the feedback I have received after the Erlangen version. I divided the material into 5 modules, incorporated smaller examples, and added take-home exercises for each module. I also frequently used LiveMeeting’s poll feature to engage the audience. All in all, I think the format worked very well, surprisingly with very few technology glitches. The tech support supplied by host was very good.

The course description is available here. If you were a participant and haven’t filled out the course evaluation form, you can find it here. I have opened this post for comments: if you have any, well, what are you waiting for? Do fire.

LiveMeeting Training on Cost Effectiveness, Siemens India

Hakan — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:01:34 +0000

July 26, 2010

July 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 11^th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP2010) and is the general chair of the Agile 2011 Conference.

Software Engineering Economics Tutorial, Erlangen, Germany

Hakan — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 11:05:15 +0000

June 10, 2010
9:00 am	to	5:00 pm

Held at Siemens in Erlangen, Germany

Slides and supplementary worksheets available here: Erdogmus Erlangen June 2010

ICSE 2010 Tutorial, Cape Town, South Africa

Hakan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:44:30 +0000

May 3, 2010
9:00 am	to	12:00 pm

Cost Effectiveness Analysis in Software Engineering, Half-day Tutorial

Norwegian University of Technology and Science, Trondheim, Norway

Hakan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:16:52 +0000

January 26, 2010
2:15 pm	to	3:30 pm

Software Process and Value Creation, Guest Lecture

Room 224, IT Building, NUTS, Trondheim, Norway

Slides: Process Value Trondheim 2010