Many projects today deliver their products late, or with less functionality and lower quality than planned because the project took longer than anticipated. This happens because we don’t really understand how much uncertainty and variability project tasks entail. For example, when someone estimates that a task will take two days, s/he may be very sure, or hope it will be two days but fear that it might take a lot longer. If it turns out that the person is wrong, the project may never recover from the resulting schedule slippage and missed deadlines.
Our Approach
Tempo computes the probability that tasks, iterations, milestones, and projects will finish on time. The Tempo tool set—which is integrated with Rational Team Concert—offers three unique capabilities to express uncertainty and identify risk factors:
- Provides more useful estimates. Instead of specifying the traditional single estimate value for a task, Tempo lets developers specify best case, worst case, and expected case estimates as a way of expressing confidence or uncertainty about the given task. Tempo automatically computes the three estimates for each iteration, milestone, and the entire project by running large numbers of simulations using the task level estimates.
- Identifies risk factors. Tempo helps project managers understand the probability that each task, iteration, milestone, and the project as a whole can accomplish its objectives by a given date, and also identifies the risks that threaten the desired deadlines. If it is possible to change the product delivery date, Tempo provides insight into when the project is most likely to finish. If delivery dates are firm, Tempo reveals which tasks are not likely to be completed on time, and so the project manager can defer those tasks to later iterations or make tradeoffs among them in the current iteration.
- Improves task scheduling to lower risk. Tempo assists project managers in identifying alternative task schedules that improve the probability that the team will finish a set of tasks on time. Schedules that are more likely to complete on time reduce the project’s risk of costly overruns.
Benefits
Tempo lets developers estimate their work more realistically and with more confidence, which benefits the project and the team.
Project managers can use information about the variance on task completion time and the estimations associated with alternative schedules to manage the project's risk factors.
Tempo Team
Technical Lead: Steven Tang, Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)
Dharmashankar Subramanian, Watson Research Center (Yorktown Heights)
Peri Tarr, Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)
Segev Wasserkrug, Haifa Research Laboratory
Clay Williams, Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)
Annie Ying, Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)