Custom Software development is difficult to measure in terms of productivity and improvement. Yet, vast sums of money are spent on Custom Software Development every year. There are many firms out there who either don’t outsource or don’t even change IT consultant for the fear of the unknown: The unknown aspect as to how to measure the success of the outsourcing?
"There's a lot of pain around outsourcing deals," admits Dr. Paul Roehrig, a senior analyst with Forrester. The situation in the $120 billion-a-year IT services market isn't quite as dire as some would have you believe, says Roehrig. About 57 percent of IT buyers are somewhat satisfied with their primary outsourcer and 22 percent are very satisfied, according to Forrester's research. But that leaves more than 20 percent indicating it could be better.
If you have your own experience with software development
then you could measure your outsourcing against your own expertise. You can
judge the quality of programming yourself by how well it works, how many bugs
there are, and how fast it’s being delivered. You’ll probably always have a gut
feeling, and if you’re a software engineer yourself, you’d be wise to trust it.
If not fear not, use the following Metrics to maximize the opportunities for
Outsourcing Custom Software Development success.
1.
Features
To measure new software
development you track how many new features are added over time. Some metrics
split the programming required into work units and then track how many units
are completed over time.
2.
Time
Estimate
IT Consulting firms are
notoriously optimistic about their ability to create working software. So
another metric measures how accurate their estimates are for the time required
to finish the software development. Perhaps ask them questions about
their delivery estimates in the past.
3.
Maintenance
For maintenance programming
you need to track the work units or bugs fixed over time. In addition, you
should measure the amount of rework required for bugs that fail the QA step
after bug fix attempts.
4.
Customer
Satisfaction
There is a qualitative aspect
to software deliverables beyond defects that is partially summed up by the term
“customer satisfaction.” The customers in this case are your end users of the
software application that’s being developed. Have a comprehensive session with
them and understand how the new application has made a difference in their everyday
work. After all the importance of customer satisfaction over some of the other
more traditional metrics has driven the growth of the agile software
development
5.
SLA (
Service Level Agreement)
The quality of your SLA will,
to a large extent, determine the success of your project. SLA are the best place to put in all the
metrics that you want to measure and reach an agreement with your IT
consultant. But remember: the purpose of an SLA is to help guide your software
development to success and to detect and correct problems as they arise and not
to play the blame game which would spoil the relationship with your IT
Consultant.
Last but not Least!
Today most people use simple
software tools like spreadsheets and Microsoft Project to track the metrics of
their outsourcing. Above all choosing the right consultant who can
partner with you in creating the best custom software development experience
for you is a must.
Customized Software Development is a cake walk with the right
consultant. Contact us at the below numbers / email to get a free no obligation
quote for your custom requirement. Thanks for stopping by and have a fantastic
day!
Srivatsan Aravamudan
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