short papers
A consultancy firm assisted an IT Services provider to win a large, European government Price-per-FP contract using ISBSG data. The data, for more than 11000 software projects, provided valuable benchmarks that were used to compare productivity and cost. This enabled the IT Services provider to produce a competitive price-per-FP offer that beat 20 rival bidders. Learn about the strategic value of ISBSG benchmarks in fixed-price, functional sizing contracts.
A telecommunications provider faced challenges in assessing the performance of its agile development teams, working on Java-based projects. The company lacked a standardized approach to measure key performance indicators. It was unable to determine how the team compared to industry standards. A lack of data-driven insights prevented the company from identifying areas of improvement. The benchmarking process used to evaluate the agile development teams relied upon ISBSG data. It involved a structured, data-driven approach to measure productivity, delivery speed, cost efficiency, and process quality. The process was designed to compare the company’s internal performance metrics against ISBSG’s industry benchmarks to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
An international, pharmaceutical company had to redevelop functionality in a critical system that was integrated with numerous other applications, including clinical data management processes. To address this, the company initiated two options: Identify a replacement package with similar functionality OR redevelop the functionality themselves.
This short report focuses on the estimation process for the redevelopment option, using ISBSG data to deliver a robust, data-driven estimate. It highlights the value provided by this approach.
Many organizations provide mobile applications (i.e. apps) for use on smart phones and tablets. Apps are an interface between a company and its customers, providing functionality and support. Hence, companies must be able to quickly add new functionality to apps. This short report compares key metrics for enahancements to Android and IOS apps to determine if there is a difference in their development platforms.
The ISBSG website offers a range of resources to: optimize project outcomes, advance software engineering knowledge, and support organizations in achieving competitive excellence. ISBSG resources include:Â data repositories, benchmarking tools, publications, educational resources, and community engagement opportunities. By leveraging the D&E and Maintenance repositories, PDQ tool, reports, and free content, stakeholders can make informed decisions, validate estimations, and benchmark performance against industry standards.
Many organizations have moved to an agile way of working. Their goal is to produce as much value as possible in fixed iterations (sprints). Story Point estimation, which is used to estimate work effort, is a non-standardized, subjective, relative estimation method. Only effort metrics based on standardized methods for functional size measurement can be used to compare team performance metrics, such as Velocity (Delivery Speed) in a meaningful way. In the ISBSG Repository, the sizes of projects are measured using standardized (ISO compliant) methods. Therefore, it is possible to compare the delivery speed between teams and organizations. In this short paper, the Delivery Speed of agile projects delivered with the primary programming language of Java is analyzed. Â
This short paper summarises the results of the recently published Global Trend Research Report on Software Engineering, published by the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA) of Japan. Many experts from the software measurement community, (e.g., from Nesma, COSMIC, IFPUG, ISBSG, etc.,) were interviewed and provided input for this research.
SAP software enables organisations to manage their business processes. ABAP, SAP’s proprietary, programming language enables SAP systems to be customised to meet the requirements of the user organisation. This short report analyses projects coded in ABAP, in the ISBSG Repository. It examines the size, productivity and delivery speed of ABAP projects.
Organizations pay large sums of money to have external companies benchmark their IT infrastructure. Application development, maintenance and support is often beyond the scope of these benchmarks. Ironically, the amount of money spent on these activities is, for many organizations, more than 50% of the total IT spend. The functional size of applications enables the calculation of valuable, benchmarking metrics. They include: Project Delivery Rate, Cost Efficiency, Delivery Speed and Value Delivered. These metrics can be compared against metrics, for similar projects, from the ISBSG Data Repository. The results of these comparisons can then used as a basis for improvements in cost and productivity for projects. This short paper delves into the world of functional size measurement, providing insights into the power of implementing and using it.
ISBSG has data for more than12,500 development projects, new releases and agile sprints. This data can be used to calculate a number of important metrics, including Manpower Delivery Rate (MDR). This is the number of functional size units delivered per person per elapsed month. This short report examines the MDR for different project criteria in the ISBSG Repository.
