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there are deadlines, and where the projects are much bigger. And they are not necessarily
wrong—you have not stress-tested your changes. Just because a change is successful in
the least risky environment possible doesn’t mean that it will be successful in the rest of
the organization. That’s not to say that the pilot project is not an important tool; it simply
has its limits.

NOTE
More information on piloting changes can be found in The Art of Project
Management by Scott Berkun (O’Reilly, 2005).

Measure Your Progress
Measuring your improvements is a critical part of changing the way your organization
builds software. Measurements provide a way to track progress, as well as a way to com-
municate this progress to senior management and the rest of the organization.

There are two important ways that most project managers want to improve their projects.
They want their projects to cost less, and they want fewer defects in the final product.
Showing improvement in both cost and quality provides powerful evidence that the
changes you have made are working.

Measuring cost
The most common criticism that project managers receive when trying to improve the
way they build software is that the new procedures and changes cost too much. Therefore,
an astute project manager will gather the actual number of hours that the changes cost.
This information should be gathered during a pilot project and any other time changes are
implemented.
Every activity that you have inserted into the development process in order to build better
software should be measured in terms of time and effort. You can track this information in
a spreadsheet (see Figure 9-1).
Effort
Week Activity Hours People (person-hours) Participants

4-APR SRS inspection 2 4 11 Mike, Sophie, Jill, Quentin, Dean
4-APR Change control 3 5 14.5 Barbara, Anthony, Mike, Jill, Quentin
11-APR Unit test development 5 1 5 Jill

18-APR Code review 3 2 5.75 Jill, Kyle

18-APR Unit test development 3 1 3 Jill
18-APR Test plan review 2 5 14.5 Mike, Sophie, Dean, Jill, Kyle

FIGURE 9-1. Spreadsheet to measure the cost of improvements

226 CHAPTER NINE