What is project evaluation?
- Step by step process
- Collecting recording and organising information about project results
- project result includes short term outputs as well as longer term project outcomes
Why is project evaluation important?
Answers questions like:
1. What progress has been made?
2. Where the desired outcomes achieved? Why?
3. Are there ways that project activities can be refined to achieve better outcomes?
4. Do the project result justify the project inputs?
Cost benefit evaluation techniques:
- Net profit
- Payback period
- Return on investment
- Net present value
- Internal rate of return
Process improvement cycle
PDCA concept:
1. Plan (identify which process to improve)
2. Do (implement what is planned)
3. Check (comparing results to know if it’s good enough)
4. Act (take further decisions to continue or not)
What is GQM paradigm?
It has three components:
1. Goal (what the organisation is trying to achieve?)
2. Question (uncertainty related to goals)
3. Metric (measurements to answer the questions)
What is process improvement?
- A way of enhancing the quality of the software reducing costs or accelerating development processes
- Understanding existing processes
- Changing the processes to increase product quality
- Reduce costs of development
What is UML?
- Unified modelling language
- Integration notations for describing object-oriented design
What is class diagram?
Depicts a static view of an application
What is Net Profit?
- Difference between total cost and total income
- Easy to calculate
- Does not consider timing of payments
- Does not show profit related to size investment
What is Payback Period?
- Time taken by a project to generate enough cash flows to recover its initial cost in terms of investment
- Shorter the payback shorter the risk
What is Net Present Value?
- Takes into account profitability of a project and timing of the cash flows that are produced so basically
- Present value = (value in year t)/ (1+r)^t
What is IRR?
Percentage discount rate that would produce NPV of zero
What is return on investment (ROI)?
- Also known as accounting rate of return
- Provides a way of comparing the net profitability to the investment required
- ROI = (avg annual profit/ total investment) x 100
Approaches to process improvement:
- Process maturity approach
- Agile approach
Factors affecting software product quality:
- Development technology
- Process quality
- People quality
- Cost time and schedule
Process attributes:
- Understandability
- Standardisation
- Visibility
- Measurability
- Supportability
- Acceptability
- Reliability
- Robustness
- Maintainability
- Rapidity
Process analysis techniques:
- Published process models and process standards
- Questionnaires and interviews
- Ethnographic analysis
