Most developers know by instinct that some projects move quickly and others seem
to crawl forward - or even go backwards at times. But how can a project's
velocity - or speed of progress - be tracked more empirically? This session
introduces Kevin Bedell's concept of "Software Project Velocity," which he
defines as a single number built up from specific metrics in different areas of
a project quantifying its overall rate of progress.
The 6
principle areas are: Software Developer productivity; Project Management
productivity; QA productivity; Environment availability and productivity;
Project Requirements accuracy and speed of resolving gaps.
The session will argue that using Software Project Velocity as a
decision-making framework can help companies decide such issues as whether using
open source components/frameworks will increase project velocity, what
the impact of outsourcing will be on a project's velocity, how the choice of
language/framework will impact project velocity, and whether providing a
specific tool to developers can increase project velocity.