Published on the 25/06/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
A benchmarking tool that lets software teams compare themselves with the world’s best suggests that Australian and New Zealand development teams outperform their peers in terms of quality…
Rally Software, a software company that sells tools and services to support Agile developers, has bundled a tool with its systems that allows software teams to track their performance. Rally Insights, which is currently in beta release, with general release scheduled for later this year, has been designed in association with Carnegie Mellon University to track eight characteristics of Agile development teams.
Initially four characteristics are being surveyed by the tool; productivity, predictability, quality and time to market. Users of the online tool can instantly compare themselves to their peers, whose results are stored anonymously by Rally for comparison purposes.
According to Larry Maccherone, director of analytics and research for Rally, who was in Australia this month for the Agile Australia conference, early use of the tool indicates that A/NZ developed software had up to a seventh fewer defects than software from other markets and software development teams here were 17 percent more productive than the global average.
Maccherone said that the tool would be extended to track a further four characteristics, namely customer satisfaction, employee engagement, the team’s ability to ‘build the right thing’ and the quality of the code itself.
He said that the tool had already provided valuable insights about what sorts of teams worked well. For example reducing the level of work in progress for a team can lift software quality fourfold, while maintaining dedicated development teams (rather than chopping and changing them after each project) could double productivity and reduce time to market by 60 percent.
Besides giving these high-level views of what seems to work best when developing software using Agile methods, Maccherone said that Rally Insights could be used to develop a series of internal metrics for a software development team and hence be used to help develop incentive programmes. These he stressed would differ company by company.
So while a health product maker might be prepared to sacrifice some speed to market in exchange for high-quality software, a toy maker might flip that approach.
In terms of benchmarking he said the tool would allow software teams to discover, say, their rankings in terms of productivity and quality. If the team proved to be in the 90th percentile on productivity but only 35th for quality, the team manager might reorganise to improve quality – but probably not touch productivity levers lest it induce stress within an already high-performing team.
He said that a toy maker in Denmark had used the tool to tweak the composition of its software development teams and was predicting that would generate $7 million a year in productivity improvements.
“A lot of the time people don’t know how their teams are performing. This is unique in the software world – we are using a big data capability to allow customers to benefit from others,” said Maccherone.
