Assessing software projects

Executives need to assess ongoing software projects. They need truthful information to decide if projects should be redirected, cancelled, or strengthened. They need to verify that customer requirements are satisfied and business goals are met.We present a set of tools for executives to monitor the status of ongoing software projects. These tools allow executives that are not experts of software engineering to assess requirements, software architectures, development projects, and development organizations. Our tools, used commonly at Nokia and elsewhere, utilize use cases, views to architecture, frequent builds, and testing statistics. The fact that many projects already utilize these tools for software creation makes it easy to extend their use to serve executives and business management. We explain how managers can use these tools to get information, how to interpret this information, and how to integrate the tools into the interaction between the managers and their project teams.