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Questions tagged [estimation]

Questions related to tips and techniques about software project estimations: development time, effort, team size, software size, execution time, run time resource usage. Please ask on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic if your question is not directly related to code.

Fred Brooks said:

It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers

On a day-to-day business context, the word estimate is often used when asking for a commitment, and this is incorrect. An estimate is not a target, not a commitment. An estimate is an assessment, based on prior experience, judgement and possibly on incomplete information about the time or resources needed to build a software project. An estimate can also be requested for the size or configuration or system resources needed to execute a software product.

Estimates always have a degree of error, so this should always be kept in mind when using an estimate to make a decision. More precision is achieved for an estimate spending more time or money - an estimate may be quick, precise and inexpensive: pick two of the three attributes.

Books about software estimation:

  • Software Estimation. Demystifying the Black Art. Steve McConnell. 2006 Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA.

  • Software Engineering Economics. Barry W. Boehm. 1981 Prentice-Hall Inc. Englewood cliffs, NJ.

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How to use robust Fitting of Nonlinear Regression Models in nlslm?

My goal is to estimate two parameters of a model (see CE_hat). I use 7 observations to fit two parameters: (w,a), so overfitting occurs a few times. One idea would be to restrict the influence of each observation so that outliers do not "hijack"…
Orestis Kopsacheilis
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manufacturing ambiguous data set

I hope questions like this belong here. So here is the problem I am dealing with right now: I have some data collected from a manufacturing process (sensor data, process parameters etc.) and for every part that leaves the production line i know if…
user7454972
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Kalman filter implementation: position with only accelerometer input

I'm quite new to the world of Kalman filter, so I have some doubts about it. I will use a simple case study: if we have a 1 dimensional world where a body is moving with a changeable acceleration, could it be possible to estimate its current…
Rox1991
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Iterative quantile estimation in Matlab

I'm trying to implement an interative algorithm to estimate quantiles in data that is generated from a Monte-Carlo simulation. I want to make it iterative, because I have many iterations and variables so storing all data points and using Matlab's…
JotWe
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Area estimation using image in R

So i'm looking for a way to estimate the area of a region, using only the image of the map. The reason i'm doing this is I want to calculate the area that would be lost upon a certain increase in sea level and I can't find any kind of meta data for…
Mathnoob
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Avoid Matlab estimate function to print on command windows

Hello I have this script load Data_GlobalIdx1 % Import daily index closings nIndices = size(Data,2); % # of indices weights = repmat(1/nIndices, nIndices, 1); % Equally weighted…
gioxc88
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Matlab - MultiStart gets stuck using fmincon

I am currently trying to run a minimum-distance estimation of a dynamic search model with the MultiStart routine and fmincon and a bounded parameter space. My problem right now is that the routine gets stuck at a random point of the estimation, i.e.…
banan
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Estimating a project with many unknowns

I'm working on a project with many unknowns like moving the app from one platform to another. My original estimations are way off and there is no way I can really know for sure when this will end. How can i deal with the inability to estimate such a…
Jas
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t-statistic from AR estimation in MATLAB

I use Matlab2016a to estimate an AR model on a few hundred time series. Mdl = arima(1,0,0); EstMdl = estimate(Mdl,TimeSeries_i); The estimation itself works fine. It's my goal to store the t-statistic of the AR coefficient in a variable. EstMdl…
user6849628
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When providing estimate for software development, are QA hours paid by the same rate as development, or by a different rate?

Lets say we tell our client that we work for $20/h as software developers. Lets say that this project will take 100 hours of development, and another guy in our company is going to need 20 hours to QA the product (and a manager is going to need 10…
crazyname
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kernel density estimation python - Evaluation

I'm trying to augment the number of records of my dataset in order to make a semi-supervised learning algorithm. The starting dataset has around 495 record with 9 features and 2 targets. So far I've plot the distribution of the features in order to…
LNRD.CLL
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How to estimate while pair programming

Reading the XP book, I have a condtradiction in my mind that I cant address and am wondering if you guys can help. XP says write stories on index cards, assign those to a developer, have her estimate how long the task would take and then use pair…
Nick Zalutskiy
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What are the possible reasons if Kalman filter can not calculate a stabilizing Kalman gain?

I have a question about Kalman filter. I am using Kalman filter for a state space model as following: X(k+1) = A(k)x(k)+B(k)u(k)+w(k), w(k) ∼ N(0,Q) Y(k) = C(K)x(k)+D(k)u(k)+v(k), v(k) ∼ N(0,R) Which the state space matrixes (A(k),B(k),C(k),D(k))…
Iman Hajizadeh
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How to estimate an application's performance(CPU, I/O, Memory)

Known: An application run performance on a server Performance metrics: cpu, i/o, memory Server hardware information: CPU(core number,main frequency, etc.), memory, i/o Question: If there is a new server and I can get the new server's hardware…
Well
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Kalman filter for bias estimation in R

I'm trying to apply KF on a simple model to estimate a signal's bias error. But the method does not seem to work. the bias error is estimated as zero and does not change. Any clue on what I'm missing and/or if KF is suited for this problem? Here's…
Vahid Zadeh
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