Hi Phil,

Funny thing...this is pretty much what I do at my company! The short answer to your question is to hire a certified or experienced project manager.

I am a developer by education, My first 5 years in the business I was a freelance programmer. In the past 4 or 5 years however, my duties have moved from developer to development team lead to small projects manager to large projects manager to my current task of Project Controller. I fill the role of a "manager of project managers", if you will. PMs report the status and progress of their various projects to me and I track and monitor performance of resources, and gauge the overall ability to deliver a project on time and on or under budget.

Measuring performance is not as hard as you may think. Any given development project should have the following characteristics:

1. A defined set of requirements.
2. At minimum, a conceptual design.
3. A project schedule, including milestones and deliverables.
4. A testing plan.

You can gauge performance of the developers by their adherance to estimates they provide on individual tasks. Obviously, they'll be over on some, and will be under on others. If you have a developer who is consistently coming in over their estimates, they you need to help them fine tune their estimating skills. Alternatively, you replace the developer. There are people in our industry writing code who do not have a clue about bests practices, programming theory, nada. Weed these folks out of your project quickly and get rid of them. They are project killers.

You need to gather feedback from the testers on tasks each developer was assigned to. The PM will do this. Testers and end users will be open and honest of a particular module or program is quirky, unfriendly to users, error prone, and simply a kludge.

Measuring performance on an overall project level can be done by your milestones and deliverables. Is the project team meeting their milestones deliverables on the project schedule? Are these deliverables well recevied and pleasing to the end user? At a superficial level, if your meeting or beating your goals, performance is reasonable. Otherwise, it is not.

Changing requirments, or scope creep as it is called, is very common in our industry. A good PM will have no trouble managing scope creep. It is easy to deal with, and there are many techniques for doing so. Fundamentally, you need to be able to manage your client's expectations in order to manage scope creep.

I suggest you grab a good project management book. Most will have several chapters assigned to project risk management, risk mitigation, scope creep, and performance measuring. I am on vacation all of this coming week, but if you drop me an email I will send you some titles that I have back in the office. I also find TechRepublic (www.techrepublic.com) a great place for articles and discussions on these topics.

HTH,
Phil
_____________________________
Philip Miles
DDA Computer Consultants Ltd.
http://www.dda.ns.ca
pmiles@dda.ns.ca
902.454.5656


>Hi,
>I've just been asked whether I know of any effective means of measuring the performance of software development teams (analysts as well as programmers).
>I've always thought that there were too many undefinable factors involved to ever be able to do this properly. For example:
>You can't anticipate all of the problems that you are going to encounter and you can't estimate the time that it should take to solve problems that you haven't anticipated.
>Development often takes longer than expected because the end users change their minds half way through and you have to go back and redesign and recode things.
>Etc.
>
>Does anybody know of an effective means of measuring the performance of software development teams? (Or should I just suggest find a brick wall to bang your head against.)
>
>Phil