Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art
About this book
McConnell separates an estimate from a target and a commitment, then builds a practical toolkit for producing the first of the three. He covers the cone of uncertainty, the principle of counting and computing before resorting to judgement, calibration against your own historical data, and a range of techniques from analogy and decomposition through to proxy based methods such as story points. Later chapters deal with converting effort into a schedule, the politics of being pushed towards a number, and presenting an estimate as a range without appearing evasive. Written about software, though the reasoning transfers to any planning conversation where someone is demanding a single figure.
Description via Product Digest.
Topics
Related concepts
- Earned value managementPlanned value, earned value and actual cost, the variances and indices built from them, the forecasts that follow, and how to read each figure as a sentence.
- The work breakdown structureA hierarchical decomposition of the total scope into deliverables, governed by the hundred per cent rule and bottoming out at work packages with a dictionary behind them.
- Estimating techniquesAnalogous, parametric, three point and bottom up estimates differ in what they cost to produce and what confidence they can honestly carry, which is what makes one of them right for a given decision.
- Project cost managementHow a project moves from an estimate to a cost baseline to a funding requirement, where contingency and management reserve sit relative to each, and what it means to control spend.