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Basics of Software Estimation

Software estimation is a critical process in the software development life cycle that involves estimating the size, effort, schedule, and cost of a project. It relies on past data, available documents, assumptions, and identified risks, and should be iterative throughout the project. The estimation process includes understanding project scope, generating size estimates, calculating effort and cost, and reconciling estimates for reliability.

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4 views

Basics of Software Estimation

Software estimation is a critical process in the software development life cycle that involves estimating the size, effort, schedule, and cost of a project. It relies on past data, available documents, assumptions, and identified risks, and should be iterative throughout the project. The estimation process includes understanding project scope, generating size estimates, calculating effort and cost, and reconciling estimates for reliability.

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logeswarisaravanan
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Basics of Software Estimation

Estimation techniques are of utmost importance in software development life cycle, where the
time required to complete a particular task is estimated before a project begins. Estimation is the
process of finding an estimate, or approximation, which is a value that can be used for some
purpose even if input data may be incomplete, uncertain, or unstable.
The four basic steps in software project estimation are:
1) Estimate the size of the development product. This generally ends up in either Lines of Code
(LOC) or Function Points (FP), but there are other possible units of measure. A discussion of the
pros & cons of each is discussed in some of the material referenced at the end of this report.
2) Estimate the effort in person-months or person-hours.
3) Estimate the schedule in calendar months.
4) Estimate the project cost in dollars (or local currency)

Estimation is based on −
 Past Data/Past Experience
 Available Documents/Knowledge
 Assumptions
 Identified Risks
Estimation need not be a one-time task in a project. It can take place during −
 Acquiring a Project.
 Planning the Project.
 Execution of the Project as the need arises.
 Project scope must be understood before the estimation process begins. It will be helpful
to have historical Project Data.
 Project metrics can provide a historical perspective and valuable input for generation of
quantitative estimates.
 Planning requires technical managers and the software team to make an initial
commitment as it leads to responsibility and accountability.
 Past experience can aid greatly.
 Use at least two estimation techniques to arrive at the estimates and reconcile the
resulting values. Refer Decomposition Techniques in the next section to learn about
reconciling estimates.
 Plans should be iterative and allow adjustments as time passes and more details are
known.
General Project Estimation Approach
Step 1 − Understand the scope of the software to be built.
Step 2 − Generate an estimate of the software size.
 Start with the statement of scope.
 Decompose the software into functions that can each be estimated individually.
 Calculate the size of each function.
 Derive effort and cost estimates by applying the size values to your baseline productivity
metrics.
 Combine function estimates to produce an overall estimate for the entire project.
Step 3 − Generate an estimate of the effort and cost. You can arrive at the effort and cost
estimates by breaking down a project into related software engineering activities.
 Identify the sequence of activities that need to be performed for the project to be
completed.
 Divide activities into tasks that can be measured.
 Estimate the effort (in person hours/days) required to complete each task.
 Combine effort estimates of tasks of activity to produce an estimate for the activity.
 Obtain cost units (i.e., cost/unit effort) for each activity from the database.
 Compute the total effort and cost for each activity.
 Combine effort and cost estimates for each activity to produce an overall effort and cost
estimate for the entire project.
Step 4 − Reconcile estimates: Compare the resulting values from Step 3 to those obtained from
Step 2. If both sets of estimates agree, then your numbers are highly reliable
Step 5 − Determine the cause of divergence and then reconcile the estimates.

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