Key Benefits Of This Book

By focusing on the art of estimation, this book provides numerous important estimation insights:

• What an "estimate" is. (You might think you already know what an estimate is, but common usages of the term are inaccurate in ways that undermine effective estimation.)

• The specific factors that have made your past estimates less accurate than they could have been.

• Ways to distinguish a good estimate from a poor one.

• Numerous techniques that will allow you personally to create good estimates.

• Several techniques you can use to help other people on your team create good estimates.

• Ways that your organization can create good estimates. (There are important differences between personal techniques, group techniques, and organizational techniques.)

• Estimation approaches that work on agile projects, and approaches that work on traditional, sequential (plan-driven) projects.

• Estimation approaches that work on small projects and approaches that work on large projects.

• How to navigate the shark-infested political waters that often surround software estimation.

In addition to gaining a better understanding of estimation concepts, the practices in this book will help you estimate numerous specific attributes of software projects, including:

• New development work, including schedule, effort, and cost

• Schedule, effort, and cost of legacy systems work

• How many features you can deliver within a specific development iteration

• The amount of functionality you can deliver for a whole project when schedule and team size are fixed

• Proportions of different software development activities needed, including how much management work, requirements, construction, testing, and defect correction will be needed

• Planning parameters, such as tradeoffs between cost and schedule, best team size, amount of contingency buffer, ratio of developers to testers, and so on

• Quality parameters, including time needed for defect correction work, defects that will remain in your software at release time, and other factors

• Practically anything else you want to estimate

In many cases, you'll be able to put this book's practices to use right away.

Most practitioners will not need to go any further than the concepts described in this book. But understanding the concepts in this book will lay enough groundwork that you'll be able to graduate to more mathematically intensive approaches later on, if you want to.