Eight out of ten business leaders say they “make major decisions with missing or untrusted information,” according to an IBM survey reported by Eileen Feretic in the print versions of Baseline (May 2009). The best measurement systems and metrics are those that enable business leaders (including CIOs) to make important decisions. You would think that delivering this measurement information would be a key value contribution of the IT Department and sometimes that is true. Unfortunately, all too often the IT Department is part of the problem. The CIO cannot even provide metrics on the value of IT never mind the rest of the business. Ms Feretic quotes from her interview with Dr David Friend, CEO of Palladium Group, “IT needs to be the keeper of the truth, the enabler of good decision making. It can’t just spew out data. It has to provide insight along with the information in order to help managers make good decisions.” If you are a CIO or a senior IT manager reading this, can you put your hand on your heart and say out loud that you are doing a good job of this? What about for the IT department?
The May/June 2009 issue of IEEE Software contains a paper by Onur Demirors and Cigdem Gencel describing some excellent work they have done to build a universal model for functional sizing that incorporates models of the three main approaches: IFPUG, Mk II and Cosmic. That this is possible should not be surprising because they are all derivatives of the original work by Albrecht et al. What is refreshing is that someone has risen above the battles over the relative merits and provided a useful comparison of the techniques. The conceptual map diagram in the article is particularly useful as a tool to explain functional sizing to new counters or managers.
The model doesn’t handle all the detailed rules of each approach but the authors have included a couple of case studies to illustrate their success with the model. Obviously, two data points do not make a conclusive proof and I am not advocating that we should use the universal in place of the three more established approaches but this article is both interesting and useful. I recommend it and would welcome feedback after you have read it.
Conceptual Association of Functional Size Measurement Methods
To some extent, this posting is basic knowledge in the metrics field. However, all the best knowledge is simple AND valuable. I based this analysis in an article by c. Warren Axelrod in “Information Control Systems Journal”, Volume 6, 2008. Axelrod goes into more detail about his categories in his article but I have only included some of his and added some more of my own:
Existence: This is usually the answer to a “yes/no” question e.g. Has the code review checklist been completed for this project?
Ordinal: This category describes judgemental metrics which can be estimated but not measured nor given a numerical value e.g. The project size is “small/medium/large.”
Score: Very similar to Ordinal but an estimate number within a fixed range e.g. experience of project team on a scale from 1-10 where 1 is bad and 10 is good.
Number (Cardinal): This is a count e.g. the number of defect reported today (which can be compared to the number yesterday and tomorrow).
Percentage: This is a well understood type of metric - a ratio.
Value: A measured value with a well understood and absolute unit of measure e.g. Function A executes in 0.05 seconds.
Calculation: A metric calculated from a series of other metrics of other categories from which the units may be implied. The algorithm must be repeatable. One example is productivity. Another is Function Points.
Statistical: Really a special type of calculation, statistics can be very valuable but very easy to misinterpret.
Can you think of any I missed?
The following presentation offers another view of the deconstruction of the measurement process:
Paving the Road to a Software Measurement Program
One of the benefits of a busy travel schedule (I try to remind myself that there are some) is that I meet some interesting people. Last week, I was delighted to meet Lynn Greiner. We had an pleasant conversation over lunch which resulted in the discovery that Lynn is a freelance technology and business writer with her own website. In one of her recent articles, Governance, Risk and Compliance, Lynn makes some interesting points and quotes some compelling statistics about how automating governance can save money. This is a timely reaffirmation for me that our own small steps into governance automation through our Knowledge Solution Services are heading in the right direction.
On his ITBusinessEdge site, Patrick Avery has just started a discussion thread on the Business-IT interface. You may be interested in reviewing the comments and your own ideas will be very welcome!
