We, as project managers must be able to think quick and effective, just as chapter 12 from The Deadline was. Today I’ll be discussing what I learned from this chapters and provide you with a little insight about the topic. Tom De Marco wrote this novel in 1997 and continues to be relevant, that is something that impresses me, considering that the world of software development is evolving in enormous steps.
In this short chapter, Lahksa gets one of the best data analysts in the whole world for software engineering projects. He is a madman packed with extensive knowledge about everything in the world. With an incredible memory, he is able to remember all numeric facts and recite them as words in a language. He gets to Morovia and four hours later leaves for another appointment in the world. What a crazy dude!
He entered Mr. T’s office and devoured all of their content. Of course, the place was looking like a tornado struck it, which was true. At the end, this analyst, T. Johns Caporous, measured each of the six projects that Tompkins was working on based of a custom metric for software effort: Function Points. This is sometimes the name that is used in real life for calculating effort in a software development project.
This metric, which Belinda liked to refer as Galoobles, was calculated by looking at the scope of the project, sizing it, looking at past effort per time in projects, and any other past data that could be useful for making this subjective metric more precise and objective. This is the main lesson of the chapter: even though we as managers do not have a universal scale expert in data analysis as Caporous, we must always measure this subjective part of the development process in order to anticipate future trends, and be able to size the project in staff and deadlines effectively.
Looking at more information about this topic, I discovered this blog post by Mohammed Sami about an in depth method to calculate effort in the software development industry. I highly suggest you check it out, it has a simple methodology that might work for your current endeavor. Until next time, we’ll see how Mr. T uses this card in his favour.
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