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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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Estimating size of server storage

You are about to launch a photo sharing site, what would be the size (as in terms of Terabytes) of your server. I am looking mainly for how to approach a problem such as this to derive a reasonable estimate. Thanks!
user976078
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How to make delivery task plan/schedule based on individual task estimates

I am wondering, how "real" work day (7-8 hours) relates to "engineer hours" term used in estimation of the time necessary for completion of some task. I think that estimated effort in EH (if correctly estimated) cannot be simply translated into work…
Goran Obradovic
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Estimating the number of test cases

Our customer has given us a set of requirments for the project. Up front they want us to estimate the number of system test cases. Is there any technique for doing this? Thanks Regards, James
James
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MatLab: is there a way to adjust fmincon to return a 3x4 matrix of parameters?

I wrote the following code for MatLab but for now it clearly works only to return a row of parameters. The code is composed by the main file, the function file (MLE_GARCH) and the constraint file (nonlcon_GARCH) as follows: clc clear %% Setup Data…
uni_m
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A way/ tool to make an estimation of execution time for an APP/ task

I'am trying to run real-life experiment for an application in Raspberry Pi, and I need to estimate or predicate the execution time for the application. in other words, before execution/ run the task i need to know how long (roughly) this task/app…
Ali Jaddoa
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Who make estimations on Agile for Developement tasks?

We are supposed to follow agile approach in my team.We have a Scrum master, Product owner, proxy product owner and team of devs, I am a dev. During Poker, we need to make estimations on developpement tasks. From what I know about Agile, only devs…
BestAboutMe
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Scrum Sprint pre-story research

When and who undertakes the work to sufficiently gather answers so that we can start to write stories for an upcoming sprint. Is this work done continuously and in parallel to existing sprints by the product owner? I guess this then creates tasks…
Neil
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Confidence Interval of COCOMO II Model

It is my understanding that COCOMO II model provides only one-point estimate. So, is it possible to come up with a confidence level when using COCOMO II model? What I am looking for is something like "with 95% confidence, it will take from xxx…
Long Truong
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Least Absolute Deviation function

I'm trying to estimate LAD regression, but it gives my the message: "false convergence (8)". What does it mean and why nlminb estimators are equal to lm estimators? Sample generation step dgp=function(){ x=c(sample(0:9,10),sample(0:9,10)); …
Art
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Scrum Time Estimation - Team Size

We have a team of about four developers working in Scrum with two week sprints. We use YouTrack and when performing time estimation in Sprint Planning, we hit the two weeks of work quickly. The issue is, for example, developer John will pick the…
clydebank
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How do I estimate task size for an open source project?

The scale of an open source project is completely different from the projects I do at the office. Work is done in spare time, volunteer work that may not materialize, personal development resources, not corporate, etc. Clearly the chestnut "do the…
MatthewMartin
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How to write a program to find Hellinger distance in R

So, I recently learned about the Hellinger Distance. Now, I wanted to generate a random sample from Poisson distribution using R, and then use this to estimate $\lambda$. Now, generating a sample, and computing the relative frequencies was easy.…
shadow10
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What's the typical size of a SaaS or Web2.0 DB?

I would be grateful if you can estimate (based on your experience/knowledge) the typical size of the main database of: A SaaS web site A Web2.0 web site Of course this varies by application type, architecture & user-base, but any average…
user272719
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How can we *set* deadlines, to allow us to work to them effectively, in an agile way?

I'm working in a team that's been consistently and fairly successfully working in an agile approach, and this has been working great for the current project until now, for our initial work, as we incrementally build the product. We're now moving…
Tim Perry
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Can anyone please suggest a good test effort estimation template

I am looking for a test effort estimation template. Please share with me if anyone has a good template.
Saara
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