Software Development Estimation - Part 3

By now if you have passed through Part 1 and 2 of this series, you should see that we have either a defined timeframe for an SDLC in a waterfall approach or an overall project or SDLC timeframe in an agile approach.

Sprint Boundaries

It is time for the development team formed to start breaking the SDLC into Sprints. This might be the easiest type of estimation as most organizations adopt a predefined Sprint time boundaries such as two, three, or four weeks.

So if the SDLC was set at six months and your Sprint is determined at four weeks; it is obvious that you have six Sprints to run including a what so called Sprint 0.

Before being able to execute Sprints the product backlog needs to be defined as part of the requirements specifications that precedes the start of Sprints execution.

As we mentioned in part 2; it is either that the SDLC time frame is fixed as part within a waterfall external project and agility is only applied to the SDLC, or the whole project is in agility with number of sprints either determinate of indeterminate.

In all cases, a single Sprint boundary timeframe is usually defined by an organization's internal methodologies.

If the team is free to define its Sprint boundaries, then the team needs to make up a choice on how frequently value added features can be delivered either to the customer in test environment or directly to the end consumers as go to market in a continuous delivery mode.