CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS

The organizing committee is looking for short (15 minutes), and full (30 minutes) contributions to the following topics:

  • Estimation Models for ICT projects
  • Estimation Frameworks
  • Definition of PIFs
  • Measurement of PIFs
  • Influencing PIFs
  • Benchmarking approaches
  • Transition from estimates to actuals
  • Measuring actuals
  • Comparing estimate with actuals
  • Identifying cost controls
  • Transferring cost controls into actual effort
  • Impact of new development trends on estimates
  • Agile project management (APM) styles

DEADLINES

Please submit your paper or short presentation proposal (.ppt editable format) by August 14, 2016, to thomas.fehlmann@swissict.ch.
Notification for acceptance is being expected by September 18, 2016.

Measuring Performance Impact Factors for ICT Projects

This Workshop Proposal is a continuation of the successful workshop in Assisi (Oct 2012), Rotterdam (Oct 2014) and Kraków (Oct 2015).

ICT Projects have a bad reputation: they often exceed budget or change scope. It holds especially when writing new software is involved; however, writing mobile apps, joint & distributed software development across organizations, integration of new services, sizing maintenance or ICT portfolio projects is also affected. Project management is needed but without proper estimation methods and tools it is limited to managing the budget overrun. For the economy, this is a serious blocker, since ICT is the major engine for economic growth. Work breakdown structure fails because it is part of the project to find out what work is needed; expert estimation fails because experts cannot remember previous decisions and their estimates suffer from important variations. Without proper budgeting, ICT projects carry enormous risks for the financial stability for the sponsors of an ICT project.

Furthermore, with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 manufacturing processes, investing in ICT becomes a mission-critical aspect of business. Security and Safety issues can destroy companies and seriously harm all kind of organizations. Measuring Security and Safety is a precondition not only for self-controlled cars and medical equipment, and these are among the primary performance impact factors in todays world.

There have been other approaches to estimation, especially based on benchmarking within or across organizations and industries. The question arises which parameters to select for comparing different projects. Functional size is a very popular and success approach when developing new software, and definitely a major cost driver. However, quality, complexity, security requirements and other non-functional, but highly influential, parameters drive cost probably much more than functionality. Team size, distributed development, personal skills, stakeholders interests, and other factors influencing people, process, product, or technology, must be taken into account for estimating. How to deal with them? What about the way to deal with NFR (Non-Functional Requirements)? As an adjustment or as a separate component of a project matching FURs and NFRs? Recently, the agile way proposed different ways to manage such variations, reflected also in new attributes provided in the ISBSG R13 data repository for Development &Enhancement (D&E) projects. Does it distribute differently functional vs non-functional effort in a Sprint (iteration) or not? If yes, how? Again, the DevOps paradigm seems to be more and more appealing to the ICT community: can it have an impact on estimates? How and why?

In 2010, the GUFPI-ISMA working group on Software Benchmarking Standards identified 27 parameters affecting performance of ICT projects from various sources, including ISBSG, IFPUG and COCOMO. They have the potential to improve comparability of ICT projects for benchmarks across organizations and industries; however, so far they were not adopted on an international level. Last year in Rotterdam, several experiences were discussed crossing different approaches, with a plenty of interesting discussions.

This workshop aims to establish and consolidate more and more across the years a community of researchers and practitioners who are willing to share their experiences and insights for

  1. Using Performance Impact Factors (PIFs) for project estimation in ICT
  2. Refining definition for PIFs
  3. Understanding how to measure these factors can eventually be measured
  4. Setting up a framework for benchmarking based on PIFs

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

  • Mauricio Aguiar (IFPUG)
  • Luigi Buglione (GUFPI-ISMA)
  • Ton Dekkers (Nesma)
  • Thomas Fehlmann (swissICT)
  • Harold van Heeringen (ISBSG)
  • Eberhard Kranich (DASMA)
  • Luca Santillo (COSMIC / GUFPI-ISMA)

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Participants will have an opportunity to discuss with experts the current state of the art in software and measurement methods in projects. The workshop will investigate whether an international standardization of PIFs is useful; if yes, feasible and, if yes, discuss ways how to achieve it.