Estimation, Software Development

The secret relationship between Elvis Presley, the Big Mac and the software development

Apr, 15, 2020 | Reading 4 min.

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How Quanter, a cloud-based App, acts as a tool of simplicity, accuracy and globality for budget management, cost and continuous improvement in software development processes.

Elvis is the king

If I ask you who the King of Rock is, you can’t have any doubt, it’s Elvis Presley. Other names may have crossed your mind, but none of them is the king as Elvis still is today.

Why is he still the king? For two simple reasons I want to share with you.

The first reason is that Elvis is the 4th deceased millionaire to generate the most money in 2017. Impressive, isn’t it? More impressive is the second reason. Elvis is the musician who collects the most for his songs every year, except for The Beatles. But these two reasons are nothing compared to the third and that is that some think he is still alive. If that’s not being king…

As Elvis is the king of music the Product is the king that governs the world of software development, the world of Apps. Why the Product? For three simple reasons that I will explain below.

The Hamburger is the Queen

The first reason is an hamburger. An hamburger is the main protagonist of an index that is published every year by the renowned newspaper The Economist, The Big Mac Index. In this index the newspaper compares the economies of all the countries in the world. How do you make this comparison? Well, it shows us the price of a Big Mac in each of the countries of the world in relation to the price of the Big Mac in the USA. It uses the Big Mac instead of the price per hour worked because it is the product, which we acquire and, therefore, allows us to measure the purchasing power in each of those countries. And it is that…

The Product is the king

The second reason has to do with the digital transformation. We change, in our companies, in your company, from a software development paradigm based on cascade models to new agile paradigms: Scrum, DevOps, etc., but we lack the philosopher’s stone that allows us to compare the ROI of our investment in transformation, that enables us to know whether our transformation is achieving success or not.

Some think that the rate is that philosopher’s stone, others instead that it’s the effort, the Time To Market or the user’s satisfaction… the reality is that the product is king. The amount of software products, the number of Apps developed will allow us to know if we are really achieving the objective or not. How many hamburgers are we delivering?

We need a governance of our investment to see how much we will need to invest and how much it is going to cost us, ah! and, of course, how it is improving year after year.

Quanter was created to deal with these aspects. It is a software in the public cloud that allows a rigorous cost estimate of the different software development activities according to the business needs in a simple and intuitive way.

It is a unique solution that allows you to budget and measure the cost of software development regardless of whether your teams work remotely or not, with three main features: simplicity, accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Simplicity

Simplicity to be used in a simple way by any person, managers in their day to day that can not spend much time to learn new methods, or complex methods to make estimates, but who know the requirements of the software they use, the business needs, without sacrificing the…

Precision

Accuracy to be able to have an estimate that is useful. That is why we have made an App that approaches from 3 different points: the first one using the industry-standard size estimation of the software product, thus giving it the strength of an internationally recognized method, the second one adapting to the processes and models of the company, since not all companies do things in the same way and thirdly maintaining a baseline of the product, to be able to reuse everything that was already identified. This way of doing things allows to be used in the …

Globality

Globality to be used within a digital transformation. Concern about reaping the benefits of the digital transformation has led many of the CIOs to ask the question of whether the transformation is a success or not. How do you compare? For this they needed a tool that could be used both in previous paradigm models and in the new agile scenarios, an App that could support them in the governance of software development both in cascade and in any new paradigm that is being implemented or that may come.

We only trust the Product

The third reason is that we can only trust the product. If someone offers a low rate to build an App, is the price low or high? You don’t know, you’re missing a fact: the effort needed to carry it out. It’s like being told that they charge 1 cent per hour to make hamburgers, but they don’t tell you how many hours they will spend making them. That’s what allows us to trust the product.

If we define the product, the quantity and the quality of the product to be delivered to us and we set a price for it, we can compare that price with what other suppliers offer us because we will compare the same thing. As Quanter is based on standard functional size metrics (Function Points) it allows us to compare development costs with those of the market, contrasting the productivity of the projects with the largest productivity database (more than 60,000 reference projects in different technologies and countries).

We will be able to compare the product developed in the market because the product is the king.

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Brand Manager

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