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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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android position estimator through GPS

I'm an engineering student and i'm currently developing a quadrotor with an android nexus 5 as flight controller. In order to perform autonomous flight I need to implement a suitable position controller and so a position estimator, here my question:…
Lorenzo
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Providing Estimates on Large/Complex Projects

Are there any standards/guidelines which outline techniques for estimating large scale projects? Looking for responses that specifically address large scale projects. Large company experiences would be best.
culturalanomoly
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Gradle: "Guess" task graph before whenReady

In the buildscript section of a project, which is in the configuration phase - before the task graph has been loaded, I need to somewhat guess if I need to execute a GradeBuild task or not based on if one of a set of tasks is going to be run... Is…
Centril
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Plotting of density estimates in matlab

Given the biometric match scores, I am required to plot the graphs of estimated densities of matching genuine and impostor scores. Following are the graphs I got for genuine and impostor scores respectively. My question is how do i combine the 2…
user2948246
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Website writing to timeline

we are creating a website and one of the things that we would like to do is to for the users (who are logged in to facebook) to be able to write to their timeline. Kinda like have an option (this is an example) I would like to write this to my…
mike
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Has fminsearch too many parameters?

I run this code in matlab to minimize the parameters of my function real_egarchpartial with fminsearch: data = xlsread('return_cc_in.xlsx'); SPY = data(:,25); dailyrange = xlsread('DR_in.xlsx'); drSPY= dailyrange(:,28); startingVals =…
user3553802
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motion estimation by FS-LBP

I want to do the motion estimation by the method of FS-LBP, but I need to find NNMN.I dont understand the ⊗ symboll. This formule is NNMN(m, n) =∑∑LBPt(i,j) ⊗ LBPt−1(i + m, j + n). − s ≤ m, n ≤ s − 1 LBPt is…
user3210485
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Plotting a power fit of for Y=ax^b

I have q list of Weight (Wg) and Total Length (TLcm). I need to plot them and estimate the curve and the "a" and "b" values. I tried to do this: f <- function (TLcm,a,b) {a*TLcm^b} fit <- nls(Wg~f(TLcm,a,b),start=c(a=0,b=0),data=rel) co <-…
Myr
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Parameters estimation on Lotka Volterra model with Scilab

I'm trying to make a parameters estimation on Lotka-Volterra model with Scilab (I am a total neophyte). When I try to run the script, Scilab warns about incoherent subtraction. I guess my problem is the same as in this topic, but the solution there…
Wendac
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I need to give a time estimate on a completely new technology for me (MSP430 microprocessor by Texas Instruments)

I've done my share of C and embedded systems, but that was, scary to say, 20 years ago! I've been a Java programmer since 1999. Suddenly, I've been asked to estimate a simple project involving C and an embedded system, MSP430 processor. What's…
Irina Rapoport
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Fibonacci Vs Binomial estimation points?

Are there good arguments for using the modified Fibonacci series (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, etc) instead of a geometric progression (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc) when estimating story points in Scrum (or any agile methodology, really)? I know that…
Scott Miller
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Is this app development time realistic?

So I'm asked to estimate the development of an android app. It's an app with some simple local database support, and a few views and sound playing, config saving. No design, just android gui. I broke it down in tasks and made an estimate of around…
barry007
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Agile estimation phases

I have confusion around the following elements of Agile estimation: Should every story in the backlog be estimated in story points? If so, who provides these estimates. Alternatively, should story estimation be part of Sprint Planning? When do…
ceej23
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R calculate the standard error using bootstrap, Error in is.data.frame(x) :

I used next program code to estimate the standard error using bootstrap for Libras Data movement set: mydata<-read.table('C:/Users/Desktop/libra.txt', sep=',', header=TRUE) head(data) custom.boot <- function(times, data=mydata) { boots <- rep(NA,…
Student
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SCRUM estimation accuracy

I would guess that there are a lot of cases where the estimation turns out to be wrong at some point. Because as soon as you drill down into the nitty gritty details of a backlog item you will probably almost always find something that you haven't…
bitbonk
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