- Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules
- Preface
- I. EFFICIENT DEVELOPMENT
- 1. Welcome to Rapid Development
- 2. Rapid-Development Strategy
- 3. Classic Mistakes
- 4. Software-Development Fundamentals
- 5. Risk Management
- II. RAPID DEVELOPMENT
- 6. Core Issues in Rapid Development
- 7. Lifecycle Planning
- 8. Estimation
- The Software-Estimation Story
- Estimation-Process Overview
- Size Estimation
- Effort Estimation
- Schedule Estimation
- Estimate Refinement
- Further Reading
- 9. Scheduling
- 10. Customer-Oriented Development
- 11. Motivation
- 12. Teamwork
- Software Uses of Teamwork
- Teamwork's Importance to Rapid Development
- Creating a High-Performance Team
- Shared, Elevating Vision or Goal
- Sense of Team Identity
- Results-Driven Structure
- Competent Team Members
- Commitment to the Team
- Mutual Trust
- Interdependence Among Members
- Effective Communication
- Sense of Autonomy
- Sense of Empowerment
- Small Team Size
- High Level of Enjoyment
- How to Manage a High-Performance Team
- Why Teams Fail
- Long-Term Teambuilding
- Summary of Teamwork Guidelines
- Further Reading
- 13. Team Structure
- 14. Feature-Set Control
- 15. Productivity Tools
- 16. Project Recovery
- III. BEST PRACTICES
- Introduction to Best Practices
- 17. Change Board
- 18. Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Using the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Managing the Risks of the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Side Effects of the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- The Daily Build and Smoke Test's Interactions with Other Practices
- The Bottom Line on the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Keys to Success in Using the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Further Reading
- 19. Designing for Change
- 20. Evolutionary Delivery
- 21. Evolutionary Prototyping
- 22. Goal Setting
- 23. Inspections
- 24. Joint Application Development (JAD)
- 25. Lifecycle Model Selection
- 26. Measurement
- 27. Miniature Milestones
- 28. Outsourcing
- 29. Principled Negotiation
- 30. Productivity Environments
- 31. Rapid-Development Languages (RDLs)
- 32. Requirements Scrubbing
- 33. Reuse
- 34. Signing Up
- 35. Spiral Lifecycle Model
- 36. Staged Delivery
- 37. Theory-W Management
- 38. Throwaway Prototyping
- 39. Timebox Development
- 40. Tools Group
- 41. Top-10 Risks List
- 42. User-Interface Prototyping
- Using User-Interface Prototyping
- Managing the Risks of User-Interface Prototyping
- Side Effects of User-Interface Prototyping
- User-Interface Prototyping's Interactions with Other Practices
- The Bottom Line on User-Interface Prototyping
- Keys to Success in Using User-Interface Prototyping
- Further Reading
- 43. Voluntary Overtime
- A. Bibliography
- Index
Once you have the size estimate in hand, you can move to the second estimation step—deriving the effort estimate. Although the estimate is not strictly necessary for estimating a software schedule, you'll need an effort estimate in order to know how many people to put on your project; and having an effort estimate makes it easy to derive the schedule estimate.
Deriving the effort estimate is a straightforward process. Here are some of the ways you can convert a size estimate into an effort estimate:
Use estimation software to create an effort estimate directly from the size estimate.
Use the schedule tables in Tables Table 8-8 through Table 8-10 to convert a size estimate in lines of code to an effort estimate.
Use your organization's historical data to determine how much effort previous projects of the estimated size have taken. Unless you have compelling reasons to think that the new project will be different from previous projects of a similar size, assume that it will take a proportional amount of effort. Once again, the most useful information you can have at this stage is historical data (not personal memory) from projects within your own organization.
Use an algorithmic approach such as Barry Boehm's COCOMO model (Boehm 1981) or Putnam and Myers's lifecycle model (Putnam and Myers 1992) to convert a lines-of-code estimate into an effort estimate.
You can also apply many of the size-estimation tips described in the previous section to effort estimation.
-
No Comment