Shorticle 73 – Estimation Methodology

For a Solution Architect or an Enterprise Architect, one of the important task for carrying out a project outline is preparing the Estimation, which ultimately decides the volume, and spend for the project execution. There are two important types of Estimation –

Effort Estimation – Typically done by an Architect, which defines the unit level activities, the burn effort for the activities, the type of resources required for these activities and the total effort. This includes all the phases of SDLC including Discovery, Analyze, Design, Build/Implementation/CUT (Coding and Unit Testing)/Review/Test/Support. In case of Agile based execution, this would be Sprint level planning.

Cost Estimation – This would be typically done by Project Managers (liaise with Architect) to prepare the cost/billing effort for the Effort estimation break-up, other charges like training, Environment setup etc., in order to arrive at total cost for the project execution.

For the Effort estimation, there are various methodology applied and most common standard methods as approved by Industry experts are:

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) - WBS is a bottom-up estimation technique by breaking the project requirement into granular units and then based on rough order of magnitude add effort for each unit level to sum it up for total estimated effort. This is one of the easiest method without any scientific or mathematic approach and requires prior experience for the Architect to decide the appropriate effort in order to get high confidence of execution.

Function Point Analysis (FP) - Standard method for measuring Software development from customer point of view based on the functionality to be delivered using five major factors – Input, Output, Logic, Inquiries (request/response), and Interfaces.

Feature Point Analysis – As a derivative of function point estimate, feature points were developed to estimate/measure real-time systems software with high algorithmic complexity and generally fewer inputs/outputs and usecase driven approach.

Wideband Delphi – This is not most commonly used as it is based Expert Judgement technique. Estimates obtained from a team with expertise in estimation and hence more suitable for product development.

There are some other standards for Estimation like COCOMO model, Testing estimates, Agile Estimation based on Scores, poker, T-shirt sizing, Voting, Buckets etc., which are widely adopted for modern software development lifecycle.   

#magtechbytes #wipro #shorticle