Efficient Indicators to Evaluate the Status of Software Development Effort Estimation inside the Organizations

Development effort is an undeniable part of the project management which considerably influences the success of project. Inaccurate and unreliable estimation of effort can easily lead to the failure of project. Due to the special specifications, accurate estimation of effort in the software projects is a vital management activity that must be carefully done to avoid from the unforeseen results. However numerous effort estimation methods have been proposed in this field, the accuracy of estimates is not satisfying and the attempts continue to improve the performance of estimation methods. Prior researches conducted in this area have focused on numerical and quantitative approaches and there are a few research works that investigate the root problems and issues behind the inaccurate effort estimation of software development effort. In this paper, a framework is proposed to evaluate and investigate the situation of an organization in terms of effort estimation. The proposed framework includes various indicators which cover the critical issues in field of software development effort estimation. Since the capabilities and shortages of organizations for effort estimation are not the same, the proposed indicators can lead to have a systematic approach in which the strengths and weaknesses of organizations in field of effort estimation are discovered.Comment: 10 page

A Gap analysis methodology for the team software process

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

A survey on energy efficiency in information systems

Concerns about energy and sustainability are growing everyday involving a wide range of fields. Even Information Systems (ISs) are being influenced by the issue of reducing pollution and energy consumption and new fields are rising dealing with this topic. One of these fields is Green Information Technology (IT), which deals with energy efficiency with a focus on IT. Researchers have faced this problem according to several points of view. The purpose of this paper is to understand the trends and the future development of Green IT by analyzing the state-of-the-art and classifying existing approaches to understand which are the components that have an impact on energy efficiency in ISs and how this impact can be reduced. At first, we explore some guidelines that can help to understand the efficiency level of an organization and of an IS. Then, we discuss measurement and estimation of energy efficiency and identify which are the components that mainly contribute to energy waste and how it is possible to improve energy efficiency, both at the hardware and at the software level

Effective Utilization of Historical Data to Increase Organizational Performance: Focus on Sales/ Tendering and Projects

Master's thesis in Offshore technologyIn Oil and Gas industry there was not enough focus on this topic as cost was not a big factor in good olden days. But the sensational drop in oil prices below US$40 per barrel at the end of 2015 made the price more than 60 percent down compared to the one in previous years. It’s clear that the sector is going through one of the most transformative periods in its history. This situation has created more challenges to all O&G company leaders by forcing them to change their business strategies. The operating companies in the Oil and Gas industry have been focusing to reduce costs and increase organizational performance. Accordingly suppliers companies need to acknowledge their focus on the efficiency and optimization of resources to be able to sustain and grow in a competitive market. It demands better control of estimates and cost on future sales/tendering process. As quoted by one of the Operations Managers “An informed organization saves cost and wins faster”. The only way to get reliable information for any organization is by analyzing ‘what happened in the past’ and what we learned from it. In other words this is achieved through utilization of historical data from previous projects and by developing benchmarking metrics. Further, usage of the historical data can improve estimation and scheduling, support strategic planning, and improve the organizational processes. The historical project data or information can help in making strategic business decisions in any Organization. It can play a significant role in providing very distinct advantage over the competitors. Historical data can help the management to decide what projects are right for the future of the company and which projects can be avoided. Further, it can help to learn from past mistakes and win future bids by not repeating them. Most of the top management understands the importance of having and using historical project information or data. The problem is that very few companies have the methodologies, procedures, and systems in place to effectively use this information to improve their project processes and to support the estimation, scheduling, and control of future projects (opportunities). The present work focuses on historical data, estimation process and lessons learned for enhancing organizational performance. Further, the work includes a case study and number of expert interviews conducted at ABB. The work discusses how to collect, normalize, and analyze historical project data to develop practical information. Three models have been developed for project estimation process with a feedback loop, Lessons learned process model and Historical data utilization process. The recommendations have been made to use the historical data for establishing references for the sales/tendering department for future estimates, which can reduce the dependency on manual or a single person’s judgment and improve the estimation process. Some suggestions have also been made for establishing lessons learned process which can improve organizational performance. The results from analysis show that by applying the recommended processes, organizations can achieve efficiency through easy access and storage of historical database, easy access to lessons learned, measurable KPIs. Also use of key variables like project complexity and severity of requirements for estimation process and historical data process can form a better relation for data analysis and utilization.AB

Using software development progress data to understand threats to project outcomes

Peer reviewe

An Evaluation of the Sustainability of Global Tuna Stocks Relative to Marine Stewardship Council Criteria

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) has established a program whereby a fishery may be certified as being sustainable. The sustainability of a fishery is defined by MSC criteria which are embodied in three Principles: relating to the status of the stock, the ecosystem of which the stock is a member and the fishery management system. Since many of these MSC criteria are comparable for global tuna stocks, the MSC scoring system was used to evaluate nineteen stocks of tropical and temperate tunas throughout the world and to evaluate the management systems of the Regional Fishery Management Organizations (RFMO) associated with these stocks

"Tying the Manager's Hands": How Firms can make Credible Commitments that make Opportunistic Managerial Intervention Less Likely

We discuss and empirically examine a firm-level equivalent of the ancient problem of "tying the King s hands", namely how to maximize managerial intervention for "good cause", while avoiding intervention for "bad cause". Managers may opportunistically intervene when such intervention produces private benefits. Overall firm performance is harmed as a result, because opportunistic managerial intervention harms employee motivation. The central point of the paper is that various mechanisms and factors, such as managers staking their personal reputation, employees controlling important assets, strong trade unions, corporate culture, etc. may function as constraints on managerial proclivities to opportunistically intervene. Thus, firms can make credible commitments that check managerial proclivities to opportunistically intervene. We derive 5 hypotheses from these ideas, and test them, using path-analysis, on a rich dataset, based on 329 firms in the Spanish food and electric/electronic industries.managerial opportunism; credible commitments; organizational design; transaction cost eco

Implementation of a PMO in a new automation business unit in the company Siemens

Dissertação de Mestrado em Gestão de ProjetosThe present work presents the research and implementation of a Project Management Office (PMO) in an automation laboratory in the industry sector within Monterrey, Mexico. The objective was to fully understand the concepts that surround the project management environment, the PMOs, as well as the challenges that must be overcome in order to successfully implement this PMO framework. The implementation of the PMO had the main purpose to solve the pain points that the laboratory was confronting in its daily business, such as difficulties to present information, prioritize projects, establish standardized processes, handover complications, poor portfolio management among others. We used the action research methodology for this implementation; providing the automation laboratory the best practices to handle extensive information derived from the complex projects they manage. With this new structure and tools, they are now applying standardized procedures, having efficient reports to management, better allocation of resources between the different projects on their portfolio and applying the right project management tools to deliver projects in the most effective and efficient way.N/

Benchmarking of software production costs: results and recommendations

This paper intends to provide a deeper understanding about the software production cost in the banking sector through a benchmarking analysis. Furthermore, the paper provides a set of recommendations to assist organizations become more efficient, productive and more competitive. This analysis was performed based on a representative sample in the Portuguese market based on a sample of 21 projects. These projects represent a total of 37.800 hours and a 2.984.000€ budget. The data collection was completed during 2 months, January and February in 2016 through different business research methods namely 15 Interviews to project managers regarding 21 projects and historical data collection. The sample went through a segmentation in two groups due to the dispersion verified among the results between some banks. These two segments were classified as "Classic Retail" - national banks of high dimension, with market recognition and influential in the Portuguese economy - and "Niche Banks"- smaller banks. Briefly, in terms of rates and considering the "Classic Retail" segment, the discrepancy of rates between the two niches is visible, the average rate of Classic Retail is 64.7% above the Niche Banks segment. In regards to productivity, The Classic Retail’s average is about 11h per unit of software produced while for the Niche segment it is about 2.6h.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio