Month: November 2007

Agile Project Management, Estimating, Metrics, Planning, Teams

Agile Estimating – Estimation Approaches

In the last post we covered the importance of engaging the right people in the estimation process and the need to use more than one estimation approach. Today we will look at some examples of team based estimation approaches and practical ways to combine estimate result sets. Estimation approaches (agile or traditional) can be divided into Heuristic (expert judgment based) and Parametric (calculation based) approaches. Heuristic• Comparison to similar systems• Expert Judgment• Activity Based (top down)• Task Based (bottom up) Parametric• Function Points• Use Case Points• Object Points Both sets of approaches have some merit, but they are also have their limitations and are open to misuse and over reliance too. For instance Activity Based (top-down) estimating is the most […]

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Agile Estimation – Upfront Estimates

This is the first of a couple of posts on agile estimation. I would like to thank Boris Mutafelija for submitting the topic request, while there has been much written on agile estimation; it is an area that comes up time and time again. Today I’ll cover the big picture view and upfront estimates. First of all we need to understand that estimating software projects will always be problematic. It does not matter if it will be a traditional project or an agile one, software development projects are unique (we do not repeatedly build the same system) and the evaluation difficulties that make gathering upfront requirements tricky also make scoping and estimating hard too. So approach the problem conscious of […]

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