What lessons can we learn if we apply ITIL principles for Capacity Management to the field of application quality?
We have seen in the previous post that, in order to provide quality in accordance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs), schedules and budgets, we need to know what we have, the application portfolio, but also its quality.
This knowledge based on quantitative and qualitative metrics help us to better meet users needs, as we will see in this second and final article.
I presented last week the main axes of Capacity Management according to ITIL.
If we try to apply these best practices in the domain of Quality, what are the lessons that can be learned? What would be Quality management seen as an analogy of Capacity management? Is it possible to do « more with less » as do more and more Production teams?
The primary objective of Capacity Management is to deliver the capacity, that is to say, the resources you need: a development or a QA server, a little more disk space for a database, more CPU in a virtual machine, etc.
ITIL adds also that Capacity Management must be ensured in accordance with SLA in a timely and cost effective manner.
If we apply this approach to Quality, we could say that the “Quality management” is to deliver quality, in accordance with service level agreements and deadlines and budgets. How to get there? Continue reading
A question we see regularly: how to improve the productivity of IT departments? In this era of economic crisis, increased competition, globalization, how to further reduce costs, where to find new sources of optimization? In short, how to do « more with less »?
I’m sure many will think that I am talking about « how to improve the productivity of developers and projects »? But I think that, more and more, the Production departments are the ones doing better to answer this question, thanks to virtualization.
You know what is my favorite joke about consultants?
A man walks into a pet shop and sees a monkey in a cage with a label ‘C Monkey – $2,000’. The store owner comes and the customer tells him « This monkey is expensive. He must be very special ». And the owner explains « It’s a monkey that knows how to program in C. Very good programmer, fast, he produces good quality code and bug-free. At that price, it’s a good deal ».
The customer looks at another cage with a sign ‘C++ Monkey – $3,000’ and says « This one is even more expensive. What does he know? ». « Same as the first one, but with C++, an object oriented language, more complex. He too is a very good programmer. And he also knows a bit of Java. ».
The customer then sees a third cage with a panel ‘Monkey – $5,000’. « Oh, this one is as expensive as the other two combined. He must be really good. What he can do? ».
« Well, I don’t really know » replies the owner. « But he says he is a consultant ». (1)
I was thinking to the previous post about the measure of the effort in a project – estimate the costs of development and QA before the project has started and there is little data – when I came across an announce in a forum about measurement of software quality, for a conference on the same subject.
You know, one of these events in which various speakers do a presentation on topics such as ‘what metrics to assess projects’ or participate to roundtables about ‘methods for estimating development costs and maintenance’.
The author of this thread asked to the forum members what topics of discussion they would like to see addressed at this conference, which triggered a series of responses and reactions rather unusual, that I will summarize briefly:
Vicente Merino asked me in the last post about Complexity and QA effort : « How to estimate the effort when you do not have code? » And more specifically « Is it possible to decide at the beginning of the project, if it will be a project important enough to require an independent QA team and formalize a test plan? ».
For example, imagine that you are responsible of the applications in aTelco company. It is therefore your responsibility that:
In the previous post, I asked the question ‘What is a large application?’ and I proposed two tables of measures, based on the number of lines of code (LOC) or the number of objects to categorize the applications as ‘simple’ , ‘medium’, ‘large’ and ‘very large’.
Of course, as I expected, discussions in forums about code analysis and software metrics immediately went toward Function Points, the definition of what is an application or the type of measure used by each participant in order to estimate the size of an application. The numbers that I had given were not discussed.
This week, another ‘quiz’ of the same kind: ‘What is a complex application?’ And ‘Is it possible to evaluate the QA effort depending on the complexity of application?’ Continue reading
Back from holidays, back to work.
I’ve got some ideas for this new season, but let’s just start with a little ‘quiz’.
Imagine that you are asked to categorize an application acccording to its size, number of lines of code (LOC) or number of objects. What is your estimate of a small application? When do you say that an application is big? What are the numbers for a ‘monstrous’ one?
Some news of blogs first.
Qualilogy had the honors of the Sonar blog in July: Sonar in the news.
“June was fully dedicated to Jean-Pierre Fayolle ;-)”
Many thanks Olivier, and to the entire Sonar team for their fantastic work and to the Sonar community, you are the best. Continue reading
I thought the previous post on the quality assessment of an application would be the last of our series on the analysis of Cobol code with Sonar. But I discovered this week a new plugin from eXcentia, very useful as a part of an assessment: the Sonar Benchmark Plugin.
This plugin allows a comparative evaluation – a benchmark – of an application over the entire code in your Sonar repository.
You remember that I have analyzed different Cobol applications, with whom I have created a Sonar View. With this View, we realized an evaluation of the quality of an application, not the most voluminous, but which had a significant number of violations.
For this, we put forward different numbers in order to make our assessment and propose some recommendations. But how does compare the quality of this application over the rest of our porfolio?
This is what we will verify with this Sonar Benchmark plugin. Continue reading