This one day course is designed for experienced managers, developers, and testers who either have to select or create metrics for a product, process, or project. The course is half lecture and half exercise where the skills taught in the lecture are practiced and problems identified. The examples and exericises are all software-related, though the concepts taught are useful for any metrics design. At the end of the course, the learner should be able to:

• Understand the process for creating good metrics and how to avoid the pitfalls
• Improve the interpretation and use of the project existing metrics for making decisions
• Know how to use metrics to communicate the status of a project to various audiences
• Evaluate what other metrics might be useful to your project, process or product.

This is a 2 day workshop which is tailored to the metrics that need to be created by the team taking the workshop. The workshop takes the same concepts as the Software Metrics Course, but instead of using the standard exercises in the course, the team works on the metrics they need to design. The workshop is designed for a team that needs to create or select metrics for a business, product, process, or project. It requires at least a 1/2 day of pre-course consulting as well as some homework before the class to articulate the goals the team is assigned to measure. At the end of the workshop, the team members should have:

• Created at least 2 metrics to propose to their management
• Understood the process to use to complete all the metrics
• Know how to communicate and use these metrics based on the needs of the audience.
• Generated ideas on other areas that may be useful to measure

This workshop is designed to identify the key improvements needed to reduce defects based on analysing the defects from the previous release of a product. The workshop requires at least 3 knowledgeable engineers from the last version that will continue work on this version of a product. Two variations of the workshop are available - a 3 day workshop or a 1/2 day introduction (which can be conducted remotely) followed by a one day workshop. This latter version requires homework between the 1/2 and full day sessions. At the end of the workshop, the team members should be able to:

• Recommend a series of actions to management to signficantly reduce defects in the upcoming version of the product
• Understand the process sufficiently to not require further help in doing defect analysis.
• Understand what kind of recommendations make sense as an outcome of this process

I have experience in both coaching a software quality manager on how to gain management support for their work as well as how to improve their development and testing organizations. On occaision, I've been asked to interview development, testing, and quality functions and provide a competitive analysis of their capabilities.