Most developers know by instinct that some projects move quickly and others seem to crawl forward - or even go backwards at times. But how can a project's velocity - or speed of progress - be tracked more empirically? This session introduces Kevin Bedell's concept of "Software Project Velocity,"  which he defines as a single number built up from specific metrics in different areas of a project quantifying its overall rate of progress.

The 6 principle areas are: Software Developer productivity; Project Management productivity; QA productivity; Environment availability and productivity; Project Requirements accuracy and speed of resolving gaps.

 

The session will argue that using Software Project Velocity as a decision-making framework can help companies decide such issues as whether using open source components/frameworks will increase project velocity, what the impact of outsourcing will be on a project's velocity, how the choice of language/framework will impact project velocity, and whether providing a specific tool to developers can increase project velocity.