Murray R. Cantor

Model-driven systems development

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

Calculating and improving ROI in software and system programs

The investment value of innovation follows from a technologys uncertain net present value and derived ROI calculations.

Economic Governance of Software Delivery

Agility without objective governance cannot scale, and governance without agility cannot compete. Agile methods are mainstream, and software enterprises are adopting these practices in diverse delivery contexts and at enterprise scale. IBMs broad industry experience with agile transformations and deep internal know-how point to two key principles to deliver sustained improvements in software business outcomes with higher confidence: measure and streamline change costs, and steer with economic governance and Bayesian analytics. Applying these two principles in context is the crux of measured improvement in continuous delivery of smarter software-intensive systems. This article describes more meaningful measurement and prediction foundations for economic governance. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/ghAM8ifyeVI is a video in which Walker Royce, author, IEEE Software editorial board member, and IBM Chief Software Economist, describes how to reason about software delivery governance with lean principles.

Improving efficiency in software maintenance

Efficiency is critical to the profitability of software maintenance and support organizations. Managing such organizations effectively requires suitable measures of efficiency that are sensitive enough to detect significant changes, and accurate and timely in detecting them. Mean time to close problem reports is the most commonly used efficiency measure, but its suitability has not been evaluated carefully. We performed such an evaluation by mining and analyzing many years of support data on multiple IBM products. Our preliminary results suggest that the mean is less sensitive and accurate than another measure, percentiles, in cases that are particularly important in the maintenance and support domain. Using percentiles, we also identified statistical techniques to detect efficiency trends and evaluated their accuracy. Although preliminary, these results may have significant ramifications for effectively measuring and improving software maintenance and support processes.

An empirical assessment of technical debt practices in industry

Technical debt refers to the consequences of taking shortcuts when developing software. These consequences can impede the software growth and have financial implications. The software engineering research community needs to explore technical debt further from a practitioner standpoint.

Risk and relevance

Conventional wisdom is that incomplete development efforts have no value. This accountant-driven approach precludes reasoning about the ongoing return on investment for ongoing development efforts. This talk lays out a framework for quantifying the ongoing investment risk and value for ongoing development efforts. Further this talk discusses the implication of applying the framework to the governance and management of development projects and organizations.