In my mil/aero days, I worked in large systems projects with very formal program/project development methodologies that included use of COCOMO (Constructive Cost Model) and its variants for software cost estimation. In that case, use of COCOMO was compulsory - not only because Barry Boehm worked at the same company and I reported to him when I wore my IRAD (Independent Research and Development) PI (Principal Investigator) hat - but because it really did make sense to gain some formal measure of project difficulty. As with any benchmark-like activity (see "lies, damn lies, and benchmarks"), we all understood that even more than the absolute numbers themselves, what was more telling was how they stood up to comparison with similar projects in our company.
That's why I find a new online project management tool so intriguing. SmartProject is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) tool offered by Numetrics in collaboration with UBM Electronics, EDN's parent company. What's particularly interesting here is that Numetrics brings its expertise in methodology benchmarking to the project management domain. You can work with SmartProject in a familiar waterfall methodology just as you might with Microsoft Project and you can make it the basis of an agile scrum methodology (more on that below).
At the same time, you can track your level of effort and compare it to your own corporate knowledge on similar projects (like that big mil/aero company) - or, and here's where it really gets interesting, you can compare how you're doing with other similar industry projects. For this anonymous industry-wide data, SmartProject leverages Numetrics database of methodology benchmark data and applies Numetrics analytic methods to create estimates for your project. In fact, SmartProject can give you a quick estimation based on surprising little upfront data, and it refines its results as you offer more details.
Why should you care? One of the interesting results from the 2012 version of UBM Electronics' annual Embedded system Market Study is a sharp increase in concern about hitting schedule. In fact, among engineering managers, that concern has leapfrogged many more conventional development concerns and continues a trend suggested over the last two years. Meeting schedules is much harder when working in a vacuum of awareness about the level of effort a project will likely require and what corresponding resources are needed to deliver that effort. SmartProject appears to offer some substance to help fill in that vacuum.
In the rest of this blog, I'll take you through a quick walkthrough of SmartProject for a simple sensor node project that I concocted to see how SmartProject's estimates lined up with my own experience in similar projects.
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