Chapter 13: Software Project Estimation and Tracking

Introduction

The Standish Group, in its much-quoted CHAOS report [Standish95], finds that software projects are often late and over budget. Project managers are frequently incapable of saving budget money; they spend it on late projects on extra personnel time. If time is indeed money, then the extra funding has already been used up on late projects. Managers without funds often adopt what we consider an inhumane practice, such as overtime, to compensate for lateness.

This chapter explores the effects of overtime on programmers. It then presents several more effective (we believe) methods of estimating and tracking time on task, so that managers who read this book will have additional tools to avoid being part of another negative statistic.