The Pitfalls of Estimating

I l @ ve RuBoard

None of the techniques just listed has worked well. Ladies and gentlemen, as we said, estimation is alchemy. Now we will tell you why.

Equations

For some reason people think that you can estimate the cost of a project using equations. We have seen people add up the total number of pages and the total number of queries and then multiply by some percentage based on how troublesome the sales team thinks the customer will be. We have also seen attempts to calculate how much business value the project will add.

There are no "magic" formulas for estimating project development time and costs.

Fixed-Price Quotes

Fixed-price quotes take you out of the Web development business and into the insurance business ”you are assuming the customer's risk. That is what the money is for, not the deliverable . Time and expense arrangements, on the other hand, put all the risk onto the customer, making them very hard to sell.

Past Projects

Basing a cost estimate on a past, similar project is, in our experience, the worst estimation technique there is. Ask a programmer, graphic designer, or tester how long something will take and the estimates on the whole will be far less than they should be. This is because our memories tend to shrink time.

I l @ ve RuBoard