Software Facts - well, numbers at least

About a year ago I needed some numbers about software development - industry norms really: effectiveness, productivity, bug counts etc. etc. Its actually pretty hard to get these numbers and after hunting around I found myself with a copy of Capers Jones Applied Software Measurement.

Jones, for those who don’t know, has made a career out of analysing software and software teams numbers. Applied Software Measurement is his latest work on the subject - although its nearly three years out of date.

Unfortunately, for me, Jones didn’t have the numbers I wanted - I forget what I wanted now. But he does have lots of interesting facts and numbers. You can dispute some of these numbers, you can argue with him but on the whole he knows more about this subject than you or me so he’s probably right. That said, there are a few points where I disagree with him and I might blog about these in future.

For now, I’d like to share some of the number in Applied Software Measurement. Overwhelmingly Jones researched American companies and American teams. I expect most of these numbers will be broadly the same in Europe and elsewhere. All figures are for 2008 unless specified.

Productivity

• Broadly speaking, in the USA, software productivity rates were the same in 2008 as they were in 1988
• The best US companies in terms of productivity and quality are about three times better than average (US)
• The worst US companies for productivity and quality are about 50% worse than average
• Only about 15% of companies are improving productivity and quality
• Similarly, about 15% of companies are getting worse in these terms
• About 70% of companies are neither improving or getting worse
• Where productivity is improving it is usually teams developing web applications who use Agile methods. Some benefits also accrue from use of Team Software Process and Personal Software Process
• Claims by tool vendors of 10-to-1 or 20-to-1 displacement of human activity are generally not justified. It is counter productivity to invest in tools before resolving organisational and methodology issues. i.e. save the tools until you’ve improved things (John Seddon should be happy with this finding.)
• Office environments can have as much of an impact on productivity as tools and methods
• Looking after employees well increases productivity and reduces turn-over
• Companies providing 10 day or more of training per employee per year have higher productivity rates than similar companies who do not
• Accounting errors (and use of unpaid overtime) can hide the true cost of software production by 100%, i.e. the work costs twice as much as the accountants say
• Formal design reviews and code inspections are effective but can fall into disuse because (new) managers do not understand this. (Tom Gilb is right!)
• “Software does not age gracefully, and tends to become increasingly unstable and difficult to modify safely. The Unites States and indeed much of the world are facing some huge geriatric problems with their inventories of ageing and decaying applications” - maintenance, renovation and enhancement are now the dominant activities in the industry and it is likely to stay that way
• On average military software is 25 times larger than end-user software, and the specifications and other documentation 200 times larger.
• Productivity and quality seem to be better in object oriented languages

Documentation & Bugs

• Producing paper documents for software development is more expensive than producing software itself
• Up to 400 words may be written in specification for every line of code in large systems.
• In a large software project requirements change and increase at the rate of 2% per month
• Repairing defects in software is more expensive than coding and producing documentation
• The finding and fixing software defects (bugs) is historically the most expensive activity and will account for 50% of total costs over the product life time
• Approximately 7% of changes and fixes contain new defects
• Most forms of testing finding fewer than 30% of all bugs

Projects

• Over 50% of all software projects are one-man projects
• Productivity and quality are directly coupled: projects with high quality have high productivity and vice versa
• IBM was the first company to discover the link between quality and productivity. They made the information public in 1975 but it is still not widely know.
• User satisfaction and defect counts are also directly correlated

I’ve mined these numbers out of Applied Software Measurement, I might mine some more and blog again. But really, it isn’t a book of numbers. Its a discussion of how to measure software and software teams.

Finally for now, I’m only at chapter 3, Jones says that currently available data on software production is less than 1% of what is needed. He also says that most databases of such data are privately held and not accessible by most of use. Well, I guess that explains why I couldn’t find the numbers I wanted when I wanted them.

Announcing EuroPLoP 2009 Proceedings in print

A long long time ago, well summer 2009 I was Programme Chair of the EuroPLoP conference. One of my responsibilities was to produce the conference proceedings. For the first time we published these proceedings online using the CEUR repository.

Now another first. I am pleased to report we - well me actually - have made the proceedings available in print using the Lulu system.

So, roll up, roll up, get your EuroPLoP 2009 Patterns Conference Proceedings for just £13.54 in print, or free as a PDF.

This is something of an experiment. In the past EuroPLoP had printed proceedings but these were only available if you actually attended the conference or knew someone who did. This limited their circulation.

Secondly, the proceedings were paid for out of the conference budget which added something like €100 to the price of attending.

Whether future EuroPLoP conferences continue to publish on Lulu, or CEUR, is a matter for debate. If you have a view let me know.

Inbound & Outbound marketing

Its nearly the end of the year, I’m about to close one Blog archive and start another - don’t worry, this means nothing for readers, its part of my admin. But it does mean that I put behind me all those half written blog posts, and single line ideas, that have been building up during the year.

Before I do so though, there are a couple of days to quickly get important backlogged entries out!

Two weeks I blogged, not for the first time, about Product Manager (Product Management an open secret, a differentiator). When I talk to people about Product Managers I often find myself in a conversation about marketing. Clued up people realise that good Product Management is, in part, a marketing function, others are surprised. They think marketing is about advertising and sales.

It is important, very important, to differentiate between the two sides of marketing: Inbound and outbound. So, for the record, I want to record it:

Outbound marketing: is the marketing most people think of when someone days “marketing.” This is about letting people know you, and your product, are here. Its advertising. Its public relations. It is generating sales leads. It is improving awareness. You get the picture?

It is called outbound because it is from you and your organisation to the wider world.

Inbound marketing: is from the wider world (customer, potential customer, competitors) to your company. It is about bringing that information inside and then acting on it. It is about building the products your customers want to buy. Get it right and sales should be like a knife through butter, people want your products.

In software companies, and other tech companies inbound is largely the role of Product Management. Product Marketing is about outbound. Although Product Manager is the usual job title some places call this role an Architect, others Programme Manager, and occasionally Project Manager. More often or not it is just absent.

Most companies realise, sooner or later, that outbound marketing is needed. Unfortunately, in all too many companies inbound marketing does not exist. Or inbound is “what the sales guy says the customer wants.”

As much as we love sales people (after all, they bring in the stuff that pays us) they are not the best people to decide what goes into a product. The reason why they are good at selling is that they get over customer objections and sell the product. This means the customer, the next customer, the next sale, is king. What the next customer wants isn’t what every customer wants.

Lets make this simple: if you are running a software product company and you don’t have a Product Manager then get one.

ACCU 2011 Conference registration open - beat the VAT rise

Just in time for Christmas, that special present for someone you love...

Buy them a place at the ACCU Conference in April.

If you live in the EU you have an very special reason to buy in the next few days: the UK is increasing the VAT rate so the price is going up on 1 January.

If you really want to save money, and you are not already an ACCU member then join the ACCU now, and immediately book the conference. It is cheaper, honest; no, its not an accident, it is meant to be like this.

I’ll be there, in fact I’m speaking, I have two sessions, one on requirements and one on patterns.

(Twitter tag for this is #accu2011)

Dialogue sheets, retrospectives and quotes (Send me your quotes)

Know any good quote about software development? Agile? Lean? Teams? Code? or anything else in this space?

I’m working on a little project and I need some though provoking quotes so please send them over - leave a comment here, e-mail me (allan at allankelly.net) or Twitter me (allankellynet).

Why?

Well, I’m working on a little project for retrospectives I’ve been dreaming of for a few year and I need some thought provoking quotes.

There are two problem I see with retrospectives - OK, there are other problems but there are two I think I can do something about. (And none of these problems undermine the reason for doing retrospectives or the value, just fly-in-the-ointment stuff.)

Firstly, retrospectives need a facilitator. That might not sound like a problem but ideally you want the facilitator to be a) experienced, b) impartial, c) available. Sometimes its not easy to find that person.

Second, I hear of teams who hold regular retrospectives but the retrospectives because boring, they go over the same ground again and again. To be effective, to get new insights they need jazzing up once in a while.

One way to resolve both problems is to use an outside facilitator once in a while but that needs organization and, most likely, money.

So, what if you could have a retrospective without a facilitator?

Over the last few years I’ve been experimenting with a technique called a Dialogue Sheet. Both in training and conference sessions I’ve used this to facilitate discussion. For more about dialogue sheets see my website with examples from XP Day, SPA and “Lean into Action” at the Agile Lean Exchange last month.

Now I’m working on a Retrospective Dialogue sheet. The idea is a team us this for a facilitator-less retrospective.

I hope to have the sheet ready by New Year and then I’ll be looking for some guinea pigs...

And the quotes: these get placed around the dialogue sheet to provoke thought and reflection.

When I’ve got this working I hope to allow you to download these sheets from my website or order printed versions directly.

Product Management an open secret, a differentiator

At the Skills Matter Agile Lean Kanban exchange the other week someone - sorry I missed you name - told me about a report from the BBC on Product Management. It turns out the report is from a branch of the BBC I didn’t know about, “BBC Academy” and it entitled “The State of Product Management 2010.” Its well worth reading if you have an interest in Product Management or the UK software development scene.

Although I’ve not blogged about it for a while Product Management is one of my passions.

Think of the development team as the beating heart of the work effort. Someone has to keep the blood flowing, someone has to keep the arteries clear and make sure the right requests for work can channelled to the development team.

This is a role. Someone needs to do this. Someone needs to understand customers and be in a position to prioritise. And someone needs to be able to have ongoing conversations with customers, developers and everyone else.

This is not a document, attempts to do this with a document makes things worse. Documents don’t have conversations. Documents are static.

One of the reason why Silicon Valley companies are so successful is that they understand this. In Silicon Valley there is a well developed role called the Product Manager. This is the person who looks at the customers, understands their problems and needs, looks at the market and a whole bunch of other stuff, and this person decides what is needed for a successful software product.

I point to Silicon Valley because certainly in Europe, and I suspect in much of the rest of the USA, this role isn’t so widely recognised.

This role doesn’t exist in corporate IT. Here the Product Manager’s cousin the Business Analyst fills a similar role but in a very different way. However, there is change afoot here, stay with me.

Here in the UK I find I have to explain this role to clients again and again. They make four common mistakes:

1. They assume the development team just know what is needed. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. They may get luck once but can you rely on luck the second time? Third time?
2. They assume that the Project Manager knows. Again this is wrong, Project Manager training is about delivering a defined project to a date within constraints. It is not about understanding customers. (True there is overlap but Project Managers training is different.)
3. Experience IT Managers see the need and appoint a Business Analysts. This is the right thing to do when you are a corporate IT department, or if you are writing bespoke software for one customer but, if you are trying to create a product to sell to many customers it is the wrong choice.
4. Managers assume it is obvious, or that they, the “managers” know. If they are Product Managers or have been Product Manager they might be right. Even if they do know what the customers want someone has to explain it to developers and be on hand to answer their questions. Senior Managers just don’t have the time.

So its good to see the BBC highlighting this role. The description in this report is very media centric but it is recognisably the Silicon Valley Product Manager role. There are some good case studies in the report.

As I said, over in the corporate IT world this role doesn’t exist because customers are captive. One of the key aspects of the Product Manager role is understanding what customers (who have a choice) will pay for. In the corporate IT world this doesn’t exist: you get what you are given. So the BA role is similar but different. (There are other difference but they are for another day.)

(Interestingly several of the Product Managers quotes in the BBC report state they have Business Analysis backgrounds.)

The thing is: Business Analysts need to become more like Product Managers because more and more corporate IT departments are creating systems for external customers who do have a choice.

For example, 15 years ago just about all the IT created by travel companies was for their own use. Today travel companies have customer facing IT systems which can both win and loose the company sales. Online offerings are part of the buying experience, part of the customer experience and a potential product differentiator.

Even though the Product Manager role is not as well understood as it should be it is becoming more important. For those who get it Product Management is a potential differentiator.

Return to Requirements @ Skills Matter

I’m presenting a Skills Matter In the Brain Session this week, entitled “Return to Requirements.”

The key thing about this presentation is that it give a very very brief overview of the “Agile 10 Step” which is the model I use to discuss requirements in Agile work.

It is Tuesday 14 December, 6.30pm to be exact. Its free but you need to registration is required.

Salami Agile

More than one software development team has encountered the situation when the team want to be more “Agile”, the organization and management might even be asking them to be more “Agile” but, there are still many “requirements” in a big requirements document and the expectation is that all these will be “delivered.”

Ideally I would not set up and Agile development like this. Yes I’d set a few requirements to seed the first iteration but I would take a more goal directed approach. I’ve written about this elsewhere - see Time for Goal Directed Projects.

Basically Goal Directed means: the team have a goal, the team will determine what needs doing (requirements) and do it (implementation) as part of the same project. The team will be staffed with everyone they need to do both sides of the work (BAs, Developers, Testers, etc.) and will be judged by their success on reaching the goal. They will not be judged on how many features they implemented from some big initial set.

But, as I started by saying, some teams do have a shopping list of things they are expected to deliver and they will be judged on how many of those items are delivered and when.

So what do they do?

This is where Salami Agile comes along.

Think of the Big Requirements Document as an uncut piece of Salami. Someone on the team - preferably someone with Business Analysis skills but it could be a developer, project manager, or someone else - needs to slice the requirements into thin pieces of salami (story) for development.

There is no point in slicing the whole salami in one go. That would just turn a big requirements document into a big stack of development stories. The skill lies in determining which bits of the document are ready (ripe) for development, which bits are valuable, and which bits can be delivered independently.

Some slices of salami will need to be thicker than others but thats just the nature of the world. Over time, with more skill at slicing salami it will improve.

Ideally, the pieces of salami are delivered to the customer early, and over time they start to realise they don’t need some parts of the requirements document, some salami can be left unsliced and simply thrown away. Other pieces of salami will be cut and then thrown away. Thats not failure that’s reducing the work and is good.

And some requirements which were not though of can be easily incorporated. To stretch the analogy, you switch from German Salami to Danish Salami and back again if you so choose.

I imagine some readers will recognise this development approach, good. Now we have a name for it: Salami Agile.
(Picture from André Karwath on WikiCommons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.)

Agile in Cornwall

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my current projects is to help companies in Cornwall adopt Agile software development. The programme is bring run under the Grow Cornwall umbrella by Oxford Innovation.

Next Thursday there are two open to everyone sessions to introduce Agile to companies in the Cornwall area and talk about the work we are doing.

If your interested you need to register at MeetUp - “Agile in Cornwall - Meet the Experts.”

Three plans for Agile (long version)

As noted in my last blog entry RQNG has published my description of Agile planning using Iteration plans, Release Plans and Roadmaps. I’ve added a little bit to this an produced a longer version of the same piece - it only adds about a page.

Three Plans for Agile (long version) is now available on my website.