Five Core Metrics: The Intelligence Behind Successful Software Management

Chapter 1. Some Software Organizations Are Doing Very Well

Metrics are being used successfully in many software organizations, including the one in a large telecommunications supplier that we have studied. In the year before this supplier woke up to the benefits of metrics, between 1993 and 1994, ten of its twelve completed projects—that’s 83 percent—exceeded budget and schedule (see Figure 1-1). The cost of this excess was more than $15 million. Alarmed by this sad record, the organization instituted a regime of measuring key project variables. But it did more than measure, of course. It began to use the measurements to control its projects.

Figure 1-1: The introduction of quantitative methods, also known as Software LIfecycle Management (SLIM), ...