Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 - (Page 55)

Agile’s Impact on Team Productivity Agile projects experienced a 16% increase in productivity compared to industry average; Rally projects experienced a 25% increase QSMA’s Productivity Index (PI) is an objective measure of the efficiency that is achieved in building a software product. It encompasses all of the processes that influence the performance of a team given the complexity of their task and the development environment. The equation that calculates the Productivity Index takes this conceptual form: Quantity of Function = Process Productivity * Effort * Schedule. A number of elements contribute to an organization’s Productivity Index, including: tooling and methods, technical difficulty, personnel profiles, and integration issues. The Productivity Index is an aggregate of both the product and the process, and it quantifies the net effect of all factors that makes one project different from another. Because of its many different contributing elements, a team’s productivity is often the most difficult measure for an organization to change. According to QSMA, productivity metrics for large, globally distributed teams are often lower. This is caused both by the increased number of lines of communication and lower efficiency of these lines due to time and distance constraints. On average, the Agile projects measured in this study experienced a 16 percent increase in their teams’ productivity – a significant increase given the different variables included in the PI measurement. Rally companies on average saw a 25 percent increase in their teams’ productivity compared to the industry average. Read the entire Agile Impact Report. Download at: www.rallydev.com/ddjimpactreport Read the entire Agile Impact Report Download at: www.rallydev.com/ ddjimpactreport About Rally Rally is the #1 partner for Agile success through its family of products, coaching and community support. With a dedicated focus on Agile practices, Rally helps organizations of all sizes shorten their development cycles, minimize risk, and collaborate across teams and silos. Rally’s on-demand Agile lifecycle management products were honored with three-time Jolt Product Excellence Awards (the industry’s Oscars) in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and currently support over 900 corporate customers and 35,000 users in 50 countries. Rally’s end-to-end solutions for Agile development also include Agile University, the largest source for Agile training, and Agile Commons, the largest collaborative Web 2.0 community dedicated to advancing software agility. For more information, visit www.rallydev.com. About QSMA QSM Associates, Inc. helps organizations measure, plan, estimate and control software projects. QSMA offers the SLIM (Software Lifecycle Management) Suite of tools, so managers can benchmark and forecast Agile, waterfall, in-house, and offshore/multi-shore software projects. SLIM contains statistics from a worldwide database of more than 7,500 completed projects, enabling productivity benchmarking on the desktop. Using SLIM to dynamically run ‘virtual project simulations,’ companies routinely model and forecast waterfall and Agile releases to deliver on time, within budget with > 90% estimation accuracy. SLIM can also derive ROI achieved by Agile methods and other process improvements. QSMA offers consulting, training, and coaching to help accelerate this capability. For more information, visit www.qsma.com. QSM and SLIM are registered trademarks of Quantitative Software Management. http://www.rallydev.com/ddjimpactreport http://www.rallydev.com/ddjimpactreport http://www.rallydev.com/ddjimpactreport http://www.rallydev.com http://www.rallydev.com http://www.qsma.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer's Notebook Saving Open Source Conversations iPhone Building Your Own Web Server Green Telnet What's New In Boost Threads? Testing Service Oriented Architectures Test Case Generation, UML, and Eclipse Unit Testing Web Services C3 Programming The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames Effective Concurrency

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

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