SUMMARY

7.5 SUMMARY

During project planning, you must decide how you plan to monitor the progress of the project. Progress monitoring is essential to ensure that the project is progressing toward the goals and to allow you to take corrective actions if the situation warrants. Project monitoring usually requires measurements.

Following are some of the lessons from the measurement and tracking planning at Infosys:

         Plan to measure size, schedule, effort, and defects. These suffice for most software projects.

         Classify effort in a few categories, and collect effort data using an automated system with activity codes for each category. To avoid inaccuracies due to poor memory recall, log effort data frequently.

         Log defects and track them to closure. For a defect, also record its type, detection stage, injection stage, and severity to support analyses such as defect removal efficiency, delivered quality, and defect injection rate.

         For performance analysis at milestones, establish acceptable limits for performance variation from planned for effort, schedule, and defects. During project execution, if the performance goes beyond these limits, management intervention may be warranted.

Although project tracking and measurement are required by the Software Project Tracking and Oversight KPA at level 2, by the Integrated Project Management KPA at level 3, and both the KPAs at level 4, the CMM does not explicitly state the need for planning for these measurements. Given that there is a general underlying principle in the CMM that major activities to be performed must be planned, planning for measurement is implied by these KPAs.