A Do-it-yourself Practical Software Project Assessment Method

November 7, 2002

Location: Electrical Engineering/Computer Science Bldg, Room EE/Csi 3-180

Abstract:

Imagine...that you are a member of the quality team in your organization and your executive has asked you to lead the assessment of a specific project...or you are a software development manager (or project manager) and you are asked to conduct a peer review of a project...or you are a quality manager and you are asked to conduct an assessment of a handful of projects to establish the best practices of the projects and you don't have the funding to hire external consultants...or you are just interested in learning a practical approach to conducting software project assessments!  If any of these situations apply to you, then you will want to attend this presentation and learn how to conduct efficient, effective, and fruitful assessments of software projects.

This presentation discusses a 7-step, do-it-yourself software project assessment method, which was developed  based on the practical experiences of numerous project assessments by the authors over the past two decades.  In this presentation, the differences between process maturity assessments and software project assessments will be described, the software  process (or project) assessment cycle will be discussed, and a step by step discussion of the 7-step project assessment method will be provided.  Along with the description of the assessment method, the following methods and techniques will also be covered:

• Process based  vs.  project based assessments
• Examples and methods to change questions on "what's" to questions on "how's" and "why's"
• The vignette approach to questionnaire construction
• Gap analysis
• Ways to identify improvement opportunities
• Ways to derive meaningful and useful recommendations
• Examples from real-life project assessments

Dr. Stephen Kan is a Senior Technical Staff Member and a technical manager in programming at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota.  He is responsible for the Quality Management Process in software development for IBM's eServer iSeries (formerly the AS/400 computer system).  His responsibility covers all aspects of quality ranging from quality goal setting, supplier quality requirements, quality plans, in-process metrics and quality assessments, to reliability projections, field quality tracking, and customer satisfaction.  Dr. Kan has been the software quality focal point for the software system of the AS/400 since its initial release in 1988.  He is the author of the book Metrics and Models in Software Quality Engineering, numerous technical reports, and articles and chapters in the IBM Systems Journal, Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, Encyclopedia of Microcomputers, and other professional journals.  Dr. Kan is also a faculty member of the University of Minnesota Master of Science in Software Engineering (MSSE) program.  Dr. Kan has conducted numerous software process and project assessments over the last two decades.

Diane Manlove is a Software Quality Engineer for IBM in Rochester, MN.  Her responsibilities include the management of release quality during product development, system quality improvement, product quality trend analysis and projections, and software project quality assessments.  Diane is certified by the American Society for Quality as a Software Quality Engineer, a Quality Manager, and a Reliability Engineer and by the Project Management Institute as a Project Management Professional.  She holds a Master's degree in Reliability and an undergraduate degree in Engineering.  Ms. Manlove has been employed by IBM since 1984 and has additional  experience in hardware and software test and in manufacturing quality.