Tuesday 23 January 2018

Artificial Intelligence in Project Management

In our consulting work with clients across the globe, we’ve been asked umpteen number of times about the best practices in Project Management. At every level of the management hierarchy, individuals want to know the key practices for project success. What’s the best Project management mantra? The sure shot winning formula.
While a whole a lot can be said about effective project management practices and techniques, the one crucial aspect according to us is the project management tool in question. The fundamental question really is whether the project management tool is supporting the new age project manager.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Remember one of the finest songs of Bob Dylan, The Times they are A-Changin’. Well, it perfectly fits today’s project management scenario.

The market today is absolutely volatile with innovation happening every second. Organizations are trying to deliver advanced futuristic projects. However, they are using the same old traditional project management tools. And here lies the fundamental paradox, one that we feel is impacting and hurting many organizations and that seems worthy of attention. The tools that project managers are using in a bid to drive growth, are fundamentally impeding their ability to grow.
To sustain growth, deliver results and outdo competition project managers need tools that give them the power for quicker adaptations, sound decision-making and rapid delivery at low operational costs. And here’s where the new age Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Project management tool fits the bill.
This blog explains how an AI backed Project management tool effectively assists a project manager.

Agile Project Management

The incremental development model and shorter release cycles of Agile helps in effective management and change. Shorter release cycle makes the system flexible, easy to change and less prone to errors. It also makes it easier to include any new changes, without majorly affecting the cost or timelines of the project. Moreover, all stakeholders of the project too, are involved in all iterations of the development. This inclusion at every step helps a great deal in maintaining transparency and visibility within the teams. A good project management tool helps you deliver the Agile Product.
Development principles. It focuses on the early delivery of business value, continuous improvement of the project’s product and processes, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering well-tested products that reflect customer needs.
In short, an Agile Project management tool lets you actually be agile. It upholds all agile processes and practices ensuring that your development is as per the Agile manifesto.

Intuitive and Intelligent System

A project manager has to make many decisions around many complex variables throughout the life of a project. To make this task simpler Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning come to his rescue in AI backed Project Management Systems. Machine learning learns about a company, its systems, processes, and employees over the years, across different projects. It is, therefore, able to evaluate and provide the description of any decision from several views. Thus delivering a qualitatively new, more sophisticated understanding of an object being studied in comparison with any of unilateral description.
To cite an example of how machine learning can help, let us take a practical scenario. Usually, in the planning stage, associates tend to over-commit. There is a huge gap in the timelines of projected vis-a-vis actual. This can cause huge cost repercussions and jeopardize project schedules, budgets, and even customer relationships.
In such a scenario AI backed reports come to the rescue.
Project Management Tools that use Artificial intelligence learn over the years about different employees, their ability to do a task in a given time, their success and performance ratio.
This information further helps, schedule new projects with fairly realistic baselines. Team-planning, scheduling, and appraisals become more authentic with this information analyzed by the project management tool.

Effective Reporting Dashboards

Business dashboards are the window of business intelligence. Displaying data and analysis is an important part of the data science process.
It is imperative that today’s project management tools bring the capabilities of machine learning, data science and AI to accessible dashboards that everyone can understand.
Using intelligent and intuitive dashboards project managers can gather together the data, understand the important considerations and provide the right answers while planning, executing and delivering a project. Moreover, dashboards can also streamline activities and reduce inefficiencies.
Basically, effective dashboards can help take the blinders off from a manager giving deep insights into the actual problems and pain areas.
Well, above are some of the key requirements that are supported by AI backed management tools. There is lot more to these tools, which are a must for the new age project manager, to survive in today’s era of speed and innovation.
To know more about AI backed project management tool write to us today at support@pinestem.com and visit our website https://pinestem.com/ to know about our AI based Project management tool.

Thursday 4 January 2018

Measuring Bug Cost in Software Development

The pace at which, the world turns over today demands a culture of change and innovation on a day-to-day basis. Innovation is the key to catch up, teamed with the ability to quickly respond to emerging threats. The time in which we need to respond however continues to decrease. From an information technology perspective, this suggests that we need to be able to make software changes more rapidly with quality than ever before. However, many programs devote more than 50 percent of the schedule to testing!
Not only does testing account for an increasingly large percentage of the time, it also utilizes a large proportion of the cost of any new software development. A recent study by Statista showed that percentage of IT spends from 2012 to 2019 has been increasing and quality assurance and testing will account for 26 percent of an organization’s budget! Both these numbers are way too high and restrictive for delivering a winning go-to-market time and winning a cost advantage.

Image: Proportion of budget allocated to quality assurance and testing as a percentage of IT spend from 2012 to 2019.

Let’s first identify, how this figure adds up? What is the cost of a bug? 

As per a study conducted by the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM,
The cost to fix an error found after product release was four to five times as much as one uncovered during design, and up to 100 times more than one identified in the maintenance phase.

So basically the bug cost is directly proportional to how far down the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) the bug is found.  The later you find, the more costlier it is! Moreover it gives rise to the ripple effect . One change to accommodate the code fix can in turn jeopardize other equations in the code.
So not only is the bug going to cost more to fix as it moves through a second round of SDLC, but a different code change could be delayed, which adds cost to that code change as well.
To cite an example, cost of a bug found in the initial phase of requirements gathering could be $10. If the product owner doesn’t find that bug until the QA testing phase, then the cost could be $150. If it’s not found until production, the cost could be $1000!
Given that testing is the key cost driver for software projects, and that it’s cost goes up with application size, it is pertinent for software companies to ensure that it is done well. While there are many different ways to adopt effective testing strategies,this blog focuses on how to use a project management tool to measure the cost of bugs and take corrective actions.

Using  Project Management tool to evaluate the Bug cost

Perhaps the most obvious place to find data that points to your team’s performance is your Project Management Tool. This is where tasks are defined and assigned, bugs are entered and commented on, and time is associated with estimates and real work. Essentially your Project management tool is a store house of a wealth of information that can help reduce costs.
An intelligent Project Management Tool can further help reduce testing costs and increase testing efficiencies while contributing to enhanced systems and software quality in terms of faster, broader, and more efficient defect detection.
Moreover many contemporary project management tools like PineStem offer measurement of what is produced, along with the measurement of the impact of the changes that are made to improve delivery.
Tools like PineStem are able to answer pressing questions like “Did this change improve the process?” and “Are we delivering better now?”

How is this done?

To cite an example, our Project Management Tool PineStem, has a very sophisticated performance-monitoring and tracking system which is used to manage tasks. Using PineStem a project manager can easily calculate the following numbers for a developer:
Total number of,
  • tasks he/she worked on
  • budgeted hours
  • hours spent by the employee
  • bugs assigned to the employee (assuming only one developer works on a given task)
Using these details the project manager can easily calculate the bugs per hour value.  From this value,  other numbers can be derived including cost per hour of the developer fixing it, and finally total cost of the bugs.
These data points offer a wealth of data for you to take corrective actions, adjust your processes, improve quality, measure teams and handle appraisals. Based on reports generated, you can evaluate individual employee’s performance and number of bugs created by the employee. This helps in taking corrective actions to ensure that it is not repeated in future projects
Thus recording and retrieving data from a Project Management Tool can help you with vital information that can be used to improve performance.
If you’d like to know more details on how to evaluate performance and how to calculate some key quality metrics, do write to us today at sales@pinestem.com.
To know more about PineStem visit https://pinestem.com/ You can also take a free trial for unlimited time.
References
  1. http://blog.celerity.com/the-true-cost-of-a-software-bug
  2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/500641/worldwide-qa-budget-allocation-as-percent-it-spend/

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