Succeeding with Use Cases: Working Smart to Deliver Quality

Calculating ROI and Leveraging in Project Portfolio Management

"If by…negligence, one withdraw from them their ordinary food, he shall be penny wise, and pound foolish."

Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, 1607

The role of Configuration Management (CM) in quality is so fundamental that it's easy to overlook. But it's pretty easy to imagineor as the case may be, rememberscenarios in which CM failures directly affect the quality of products. CM is important enough that it is in the foundational layera Level 2 Key Process Area (KPA)of the Capability Maturity Model.

Briefly put, the role of CM in quality management is

• Building a product with the right parts, assembled in the right way.

• When correctly assembled, controlling change to prevent, or at least minimize, introduction of defects.

In addition to its importance in the Capability Maturity Model, configuration management also plays an important role in many of the newer development methodologies. McCarthy's (1995) philosophy of software development includes development rules, such as Rule #32: If you build it, it will ship and Rule #33: Get to a known state, and stay there, which put CM center stage in development. And Alistair Cockburn remarks that software configuration management tools are one of the tools most critical to the success of the agile project (Hass 2003).

While we naturally associate CM with source code, its scope includes many other work products and deliverables of the project (e.g. release notes, user manuals, installation instructions, and even the tracking of defects, both resolved and unresolved). And lest we forget, CM most definitely applies to use cases! Leffingwell and Widrig (2003) discuss the benefits of requirements management based on a CM approach, what they call "requirements configuration management," or as it applies specifically to use cases, use case configuration management.

Although CM does not necessarily imply tool support, if your projects and products are of any significant size, manual CM is typically not practical. But while there is no shortage of available commercial CM systems, using these tools to support the CM of requirements, and specifically use cases, is a newer concept for many companies. As Leffingwell and Widrig (2003) have noted, even organizations that have rigorous CM of source code are often lacking in CM of requirements such as use cases. Given the importance of requirements and the high cost of fixing defects in them, are such companies "penny wise but pound foolish" in avoiding the IT expense, training, and process needed for more rigorous use case configuration management?

In this part of the book, we are going to look at tool support for CM of use cases, ask whether it makes sense for your company, and see a powerful way to leverage it if you have it.

In Chapter 7, "Calculating Your Company's ROI in Use Case Configuration Management," you will learn about some of the benefits of tool support for use case CM, couched in terms of a Return on Investment (ROI) model. You will learn about:

• A common method for calculating the Return On Investment (ROI) for IT investments.

• A model you can use as a starting basis to evaluate your company's ROI in tool support of use case CM.

• Typical sources of cost associated with the introduction and use of a tool for use case CM.

• How to estimate the savings for your company due to reduction in operating expenses (e.g., daily time savings and eliminated rework) due to the introduction of a tool for use case CM.

In Chapter 8, "Leveraging Your Investment in Use Case CM in Project Portfolio Management," you'll learn more ways that tool support of use case CM can benefit your company. You will:

• Learn how to leverage your company's investment in use case CM to provide metrics and reports for what could well be the most far-reaching, single process improvement possible in your company: Project Portfolio Management.

• See how to leverage some simple use case-based metrics to evaluate whether or not your portfolio of projects is reasonable given your company's limited development resources, evaluate the mix of strategic project types in the project portfolio, and track the status of large numbers of projects in the portfolio.