Assess, Benchmark, and Monitor Your Portfolio of Software Factories

Context

The use case applies to larger-scale software development organizations that work on more than one software system. Large corporations often manage a portfolio of "software factories," which are software organizations built around one software system, and continuously create and adapt code to add features to the software system. Each software factory is more or less independent in their decisions regarding tools, methods, and programming languages. 

Your job is to spot software factories that require your management attention. This entails defining standards and best-practices that serve as guardrails for the individual software factories and ensuring that the heterogeneity in your overall organization is kept at a manageable level.

Pains

You want to lead the overall organization to best performance. But how can you do this if you don’t even have means to assess the performance of an individual software factory?

You may have some KPIs that you observe for each software factory, such as costs (resources, money) or defect rates. But such KPIs are not helpful for your birds-eye view. Comparing software factories with these KPIs won’t create insights. It’s like comparing apples with oranges.

Gains

Leveraging Seerene's software analytics platform would be extremely valuable in your situation to:

• Measure the performance of each software factory in a comparable and objective way - in a sense you would want reasonable KPIs that can be applied even if the individual software factories claim to be “apples” and “oranges”.
• Monitor long-term trends across the portfolio of software factories so that you can observe if your portfolio-level guidelines and guardrails have a positive impact on the overall performance of your portfolio.
• Identify best-in-class software factories in your overall organization so that you can foster best-practice sharing across your organization and lead your overall organization towards the optimum.