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, November 11, 2013 - 8:30am

Full-day Tutorials

Agile Release Planning, Metrics, and Retrospectives

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. In hands-on exercises, learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments in your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - 3:45pm

Metrics

Game Changing Practices in Software: Data from Recent Benchmark Research

As agile practices become mainstream, compelling patterns are being revealed about defect rates, time-to-market, and effort/staffing. Industry data from QSM Associates reveals that many companies grapple with collocation, pair programming, offshoring, and combining agile with waterfall methods. Some of the best teams find significant schedule and quality implications that are literally redefining the economics of software; others are not. What factors make a meaningful difference?