2011 Issue

64 you will be seeing incomplete screens, bugs, and errors, but the ability to remain in touch with visible progress is invaluable. In my experience, examining progress more frequently than every two weeks leaves the groups discussing the same issues every week. Two weeks is a magical timeframe where a development team can produce a substantial amount of new deliverables. Understand that if you make additional feature requests, it’s only fair to the development team and the project to add more schedule and budget to the plan. If you are unwilling to do this, you are cheating. • Insist on empirical status updates. Don’t be fooled by com- ments like, I think we are on track, or I feel good about our progress! Be on alert for these types of well-intended but counterfeit status reports and insist that your team show you a breakdown of work allotted against work completed. Your team many not know how to do this — it’s tricky with software. Have them find a software coach or a best practices software training group to learn this skill. There is a humorous but painfully true axiom about software development where a project is known for the first 90% of the effort taking 90% of the time, and the last 10% taking the other 90% of the time. At the end of the project • You may find your development team not recommend- ing a significant amount of testing time.They may be inexperienced, overconfident, or nervous to ask for too much testing time because to them it can seem like they are asking you to fund for deficiencies in their judgment. Help your development team by stipulating a generous amount of time for testing. The ISBSG, an internationally known software metrics organization, publishes statistics indicating that testing for the average software project represents about 22%of the overall effort. If your ratio is much less than this, you either have remarkable developers, or you will pay muchmore in post-release damage control and reputational recovery. The costs for fixing defects seem to grow exponentially if they are missed and cascade into production code. For the benefit of everyone involved, invest in an adequate testing effort. • As part of the release package, insist on an updated sche- matic of the application’s architecture, a maintenance plan, a troubleshooting guide, and a central knowledge base where all of these materials can be located and retrieved with ease. If your users are in-house, schedule a training session with them. Always be sure your help desk group is trained on newly released software. A good help desk can make a challenged product acceptable. An uninformed help desk can make a good software product and development team look bad. • Finally, be sure to celebrate a successful product launch with your development group. They will appreciate the recognition and will always remember the celebratory event. Mr. Berry is presently the Chief Methodologist for Red Rock Research, a softwaredevelopmentmanagementtrainingfirmbasedinSaltLakeCity,UT. Having worked in the software industry since 1987, he has managed large teams of software developers, database administrators, project managers, software testers, and produced separate enterprise software applications that have been used in over 2500 banking branch sites, 600 medical clinics, and multiple distribution offices in 12 countries. His consulting work has taken him all over the US, to Europe and the South Pacific. Dancing with Your Software Team — continued from page 47 Education in Utah — continued from page 55 Working through its education committee, the UCLS made contact with Utah Valley University (UVU). Be- cause SLCC and UVU had existing articulation agree- ments in place for other transfer programs and there are 40 miles separating the two institutions, this was a logical fit for both schools. The UCLS, UVU, and SLCC have been working to- gether for the past four years in the development of the proposed Bachelor of Science degree in Geomat- ics at UVU, with most of the administrative planning and curriculum development being performed by UVU. At press time the UVU degree program was on the December 2010 agenda of the Utah State Board of Regents for final review and approval. If approved, the BS degree program will be implemented during the 2011 - 2012 academic year effective July 1, 2011. In support of this process, the SLCC program is chang- ing its name from Surveying to Geomatics . With most of the 69 credit hours in the SLCC programarticulating to the UVU program, surveying students wanting to earn a BS degree would be able complete the first two years at SLCC and transfer to UVU After the UVU BS degree is in place and is in full opera- tion, the UCLS has plans to work again with the Utah state legislature to raise the bar for surveying education in Utah from a minimum two-year surveying degree to a four-year degree to meet the NCEES challenge and standard. As the bar is lifted again, the surveying and geomatics profession is improved and lifted. When I reminisce over the past years since having first dreamed of a surveying degree program in Utah, I’m proud and in awe of all that has been accomplished. So many people united in a common effort and with a shareddream.Menandwomenhavecome fromall parts of Utah and other areas to perform their roles in making the shareddreama reality. I have respectfullywritten this column in their honor, to give credit where credit is due, and to thank each of them for a job well done! For more information on the SLCC surveying program visit www.slcc.edu/ surveying. Mr. Cunningham received his degree in Civil Engineering, Cartography, Geography from Brigham Young University, and is a professional land surveyor in Utah. His surveying career spans over 44 yearson a wide variety of construction, boundary, and mapping projects in Alaska, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Canada, and Mexico, including the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline, Kuparuk and Prudhoe Bay Oil Fields, Terror Lake Hydroelectric Dam, Gray Cliffs Subdivision, Central Utah Project, I-80 Construction Project, City of Orem, I-15 Reconstruction, Bureau of Land Management’s Utah Geographic Coordinate Data Base. He currently serves as a Surveying Faculty Member, and as the Coordinator of the Surveying Technology Program at Salt Lake Community College. Berry Cunningham