Feedback report to the Nesma community
As you all know, Nesma considers the availability of historical data of software projects and maintenance of an utmost importance for the industry. Nesma is therefore a proud member of the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG). This not-for-profit organization collects industry project data (new developments and maintenance & support) in order to help the industry to advance by making better decisions based on data.
Once a year, ISBSG organizes a workshop where the members are invited to discuss and influence the strategy, the products, the data collection processes and other issues. This year, the focus has mainly been on Agile and DevOps team data. Metrics associations all over the world recognize the ‘problem’ in the industry, where self-managing teams use non-standardized units of measurement (story points) for sprint estimation and progress measurement. It is commonly recognized that this is perfectly OK for the teams, but for budgeting and financial management processes in the organization, standardized metrics are still crucial for estimation, progress measurement, portfolio management and benchmarking. Nesma recognizes this, which is one of the reasons Nesma started the creation of the Software Cost Estimation Body of Knowledge together with ICEAA. ISBSG acknowledges this and wishes to collect as much Agile and DevOps data from the industry as possible, also to show the actual differences between agile and traditional development methodologies.
At the Annual General Meeting, Nesma board member Harold van Heeringen was re-elected as ISBSG president, which is great news for Nesma and ensures optimal connection to the ISBSG and the data collected and provided.
IT Confidence conference, Beijing 2017
Since 2013, the ISBSG workshop is connected to a 1-day conference called ‘IT Confidence’. This conference focuses on the use of historical data in project estimating, project control, supplier performance measurement, benchmarking and outsourcing. This year’s event was organized by Nesma partner China SPI in Beijing, China. Presentations included relevant topics like the impact of size on productivity, Software hour rates and productivity rates of vendors in relation to different customers, Improving Estimation Maturity using function points and historical data and many others.
The presentations can be downloaded here.
For more information about ISBSG, check www.isbsg.org or contact the Nesma working group Benchmarking (wgBenchmarking@nesma.org).