Thursday, December 29, 2011

Motivations (paper review again)

Motivational factors for software engineers:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2010.12.017

I've blogged about motivational factors in software engineering before. Here is another, more recent paper about that. I recommend the reading since the study seems solid and the results are rather interesting.

Table 11 lists "Use of competence in Software Engineering" as the main motivational factor. This means that software engineers like to be called that and that the profession has very specific skill requirements.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Lean efficiency (paper review)

Lean efficiency
http://www.informs.org/content/download/242195/2304425/file/ASP,%20The%20Art%20and%20Science%20of%20Practice.pdf

I've posed a number of reviews of metrics in the "Agile" world and then I though that I've not done so much in the area of Lean development. Lean software development creeps in more and more often into larger companies and the topic begins to be "hot" increasingly often.

So, what kind of metrics are there in Lean development except for the famous Six-Sigma that is simple, yet complex. The Six-sigma book review I started with a while ago was, let's be honest, a starter.

In my work I often refer to this article. This is an interesting piece of analysis of ONE simple metric - inventory - in the context of Lean effectiveness and efficiency. What I like about this paper is the solid analytical ground for it. The analysis of companies and data from a number of years. The only thing that I wonder is the presence of the geopolitics (or the lack of it). Could that play a part in the intentory levels of the studied companies? Does a market pressure affect the inventory levels of software development companies?

I guess I'll need to do that analysis myself one day.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Beyond accuracy...

Beyond accuracy...
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1189572

Working with metrics one gets to understand that there is billions of metrics that could measure one attribute and that there are equally many ways to collect these metrics. However, one often forgets that metrics are to be used by stakeholder - often humans:)

This paper is a nice touch on the subject. Recommend this reading for the long winter evenings.

Picture: screenshot from ACM Digital library.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Metrics leading to agility

Metrics leading to agility...
http://www.slideshare.net/Softwarecentral/microsoft-word-metrics-of-agility-leads-to-agility-in-testing

This paper from Tata services shows a number of interesting metrics. RTF, which I've already mentioned and others. Like the time from business decision to delivery.

The metric itself is no rocket science, but it is interesting to read about how they measure it.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Metrics for continuous deployment

In my search of proven metrics that would stimulate continuous deployment I've encountered this slideshow: http://www.slideshare.net/ashmaurya/continuous-deployment-startup-lessons-learned. The slides are quite high-level, but they contain a few metrics - LOC per release being one of them - which I found important for the deployment.

A company stimulating continuous deployment should strive to increase and optimize this number over time. If the LOC per release decrease, the customer value is likely to decrease too - regardless how often the company releses.