Michael Mah

QSM Associates, Inc.

With twenty-five years of industry experience Michael Mah teaches, writes, and consults for QSM Associates to tech companies on measuring and estimating software projects for offshore, waterfall, and agile. Michael and his QSM partners have researched thousands of projects worldwide. His work examines time-pressure dynamics of teams and their contribution to project success and failure. Michael’s clients include Boeing, Progressive, Verizon Wireless, Nationwide, JPMorgan Chase, Roche, and other Fortune 100 companies. He is the director of the Benchmarking Practice at the Cutter Consortium in the US. A private pilot, Michael lives in the mountains of western Massachusetts. He can be reached at qsma.com.

Speaker Presentations

Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am

Full-day Tutorials

Agile Release Planning, Metrics, and Retrospectives SOLD OUT!

How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm

Agile Leadership

Agile Redefines Global Economics: What Recent Data Reveals

Kent Beck, inventor of eXtreme Programming, defined agile success as delivering more useful functionality with fewer defects. Against that definition, early research revealed mixed success. Many organizations did not know how to measure and thus could not have “fact-based” conversations about productivity and cost. Some teams achieved faster delivery, but quality did not improve. Others found both. What factors made the difference? New benchmark analysis by QSM Associates reveals the latest productivity, time-to-market, quality, and cost patterns.