I am looking for ideas about sizing an large development shop. Our organization has a development shop that is larger than many full shops I have been in. The Test Sysplex currently uses 2000 - 2500 MIPS and continues to grow. Historically, we have managed to keep just ahead of their demand. However, lately demand has sometimes gotten ahead of us. Currently, while it is something of a problem, its impact is lessened by the fact that the development sysplex share hardware with production and has been able to borrow MIPS from time to time.
We have also outgrown any commercial backup site, so we will be dividing our workloads along natural lines and will have geographically dispersed sites. The initial workload moving to the new site will be the development work. Hence the question of sizing. Initially, there will be no other work to borrow from, so the size we pick should allow development to continue unhindered without providing excess resources. Of course, there is Capacity-On Demand. It's a nice feature. However, when we add a processor, we add cost. And we can only spend what has been budgeted... so we need to be right, or very close to it. Currently, we primarily base our projections on history repeating itself. That is we fit curves to our historical data and then use the most similar curve to predict the future. Additionally, with new work-loads, we get estimates of the size of the effort (i.e., number of programmers, lines of code, whatever) and adjust the historical by our machinations based on specifics. As I say, we have historically done well with accuracy. However, with the developers moving to a separate environment, it behooves us to look with greater diligence with future projections. Your assistance is greatly appreciated. Best Regards, Marty Stahl ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
