CIS 554 Discussion Responses course scholar

There are two discussions here that need to be responded to thoroughly. Responses must be on APA format 150+words 1-2 legitimate verifiable sources per response.

CIS5554 discussion 1 post responses.

Respond to the colleagues posts regarding:

“Measure and Control” Please respond to the following:

• Measuring and controlling project deliverables is essential to validating work performed within a project. Evaluate how project status reports are useful for measuring and controlling resource efforts, project schedules, project costs, and project features of a software project deliverable.

• Identify additional attributes of a software project that may be important to measure and control. Describe why they are important and how these attributes might be used to measure and control.

JM’s post states the following:

“Measure and Control” Please respond to the following: 

• Measuring and controlling project deliverables is essential to validating work performed within a project. Evaluate how project status reports are useful for measuring and controlling resource efforts, project schedules, project costs, and project features of a software project deliverable.

When a project is first planned, baselines are established for schedule, cost, scope, and performance measurement (Project Management Institute, 2017, pp. 87–88). As part of the monitor and control phase of the project, measurements are analyzed to determine project or product status. These are then compared to the baselines to determine the amount of variance that exists. Variance analysis can be conducted within each project management knowledge are, and will show the difference between the planned  work (baseline) and actual performance. This will show the urn value as it pertains to duration estimates, cost estimates, resource utilization, resource rates, technical performance, and many other metrics (Project Management Institute, 2017, p. 111). The amount of variance is can then be evaluated as to the impact it will have on achieving project objectives. With this information in hand, the project team will know whether they need to fix defects in the product, make process improvements, employ a combination or both, or do nothing at all. 

• Identify additional attributes of a software project that may be important to measure and control. Describe why they are important and how these attributes might be used to measure and control.

As mentioned above, there are a plethora of metrics that can be measured. These might include technical performance, resource utilization, resource rates, escaped defects, project or sprint burndown, ticket close rate, code churn, refactoring rate, new work, lead time, cycle time, deployment and commit frequency, change failure percentage, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), and Mean Time To Recover/Repair (MTTR) (Lafleur, 2019). This does not mean however, that they must all be measured. It is important for the project management team to focus on metrics that will ensure the project is delivering according to its stated objectives and customer requirements. I leveraging metrics specific to those areas the project team can focus on the metrics they have the most meaning, and not just be collecting a bunch of useless information. This will give the team indications of when things are going according to plan and if done frequently enough should identify problems before they become so severe that they sideline the entire project.

Lafleur, J. (2019, August 13). 7 rules to track software engineering metrics correctly | hacker noon. https://hackernoon.com/how-to-use-and-not-abuse-software-engineering-metrics-3i11530tr

Project Management Institute. (2017, September 6). PMBOK® Guide Sixth Edition. https://www.pmi.org/pmbok-guide-standards/foundational/pmbok

CIS554 discussion 2 post responses.

Respond to the colleagues posts regarding:

“Software Defects” Please respond to the following:

• Measuring and analyzing software defects is critical for software and system development. Describe the relationship between defect detection and rolling-wave adjustments. Determine the measures that may be performed to minimize the activities associated with rolling-wave planning. 

• Examine the factors that determine the availability of a system. Compare these factors and describe how they are interrelated. Suggest the tests that may be performed to determine these factors.

DT’s post states the following:

“Software Defects” Please respond to the following:

• Measuring and analyzing software defects is critical for software and system development. Describe the relationship between defect detection and rolling-wave adjustments. Determine the measures that may be performed to minimize the activities associated with rolling-wave planning. 

In software projects, the process by which defects are measured and analyzed plays a major role in how adjustments are made to details of the project that were previously defined in the planning phase.  As project managers, it is important to realize that mistakes are going to happen on every project.  Software defects are caused by two kinds of human mistakes.   The first is caused by not doing something that should have been done.  This is known as the “error of omission”.  The second is caused by doing something incomplete, inconsistent, or incorrect.  This type defect is known as the “error of comission”.  Once these defects are detected either in the  process of accepting work products or after, they are prepared and detailed in Defect Reports (DR) used to track the defect repair process.  After analyzing the DR’s, project managers can make changes to work activities known as rolling-wave adjustments based on details from the reports.  They can include adjustments to the amount of user cases to be developed, the number of prototypes to be constructed, or the number of test scenarios to be generated.

The number of activities associated with rolling-wave planning can be minimized by performing Measures of Effectiveness (MOE’s), Measures of Performance (MOP’s), and Technical Performance Measures (TPM’s).  MOE’s are measures to see how well operational tasks are accomplished through using a system.  MOP’s measures the degree of success in which those tasks are performed.  And TPM’s measures system attributes to see how well a system meets specified requirements. 

• Examine the factors that determine the availability of a system. Compare these factors and describe how they are interrelated. Suggest the tests that may be performed to determine these factors.

Two factors that are used to determine the availability of a system is uptime and downtime.  The process by which these factors are used is to divide uptime by the sum of uptime and downtime. For example, if a system was available 300 hours out of a month and down 30 hours for various reasons, the equation would look like this.

Availability = 300 / (300 + 30)

Availability = 300 / 330

Availability = .91 or 91%

Three questions to answer to see if a system is available are “Is the system functioning?”, “Does the system functions under normal conditions?”, and “Does the system function when needed?”  To help answer these questions, metrics like MOE’s, MOP’s, and TPM’s can all be used to determine a system’s uptime and downtime.