1. You are working for a large Fortune 500 company, developing software for their website.  Your company uses ISO9000, so your team follows well-defined processes and procedures for everything, does formal inspections, testing, defect tracking and fixing, release procedures, and gathers metrics on project time and effort.  However, they do NOT do any software-specific quality practices or metrics, they just follow procedures and generate project management graphs.  Your boss (a non-software person) has recently heard of CMMI, and wants to know whether it would be useful for your team.

a. Identify two reasons why and how your team would benefit from using CMMI, rather than just ISO9000.

b. Your boss also likes the idea of improving metrics practices (but your colleagues are skeptical, and believe it will only increase the already high process burden).  Identify three metrics that would MOST help your team (or discuss how to go about identifying which three metrics would be most useful for your team, in terms of cost-benefit).  Give reasons for your answer.

c. Your company conducts periodic assessments of projects, but they are totally evidence-oriented in their assessment.  Give them two reasons why it may be good to add subjective inputs rather than focusing only on evidence (in terms of value to your team/organization).

d. For project management, your company currently uses only the following charts: slippage, staffing, milestones (planned vs. actual dates of achieving milestones), estimation accuracy and effort (planned vs. actual effort).  You are trying to convince your manager that it would be useful from a project management perspective to also have graphs of requirements volatility and defects found over time.  Explain how they would help in managing the project better.  (Hint: one aspect to discuss is how they can help in explaining slippage and why actual effort is different from planned effort).

e. Suggest at least two other metrics that your project manager may find helpful for identifying and resolving problems while the project is in progress, and explain very briefly how they help.

f. Is the above the best approach for your team?  Can you think of any alternative approaches that may work better?  Explain what and why.

2. Pick three (3) project management metrics.  For each:

a. Identify bad ways to improve the metric (for example, productivity can be improved by not testing software adequately). 

b. Identify other metrics we have discussed that would be negatively impacted by this. 

c. Is there a bad way to improve each metric that will not result in negatively impacting any other metric?

3. Pick one activity metric each for requirements, design, coding and testing.  For each metric:

a. Discuss the value of the metric.

b. Discuss the limitations of the metric.

4. Identify three do’s and don’ts for:

a. Assessments

b. Organizational Quality Engineering