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Software Estimating Resources

Herding Cats

This blog page is dedicated to the resources used to estimate software-intensive systems using traditional and agile development methods. Cost Modeling Agile Software Development,” Maarit Laanti and Petri Kettunen, International Transactions on Systems and Applications, Volume 1 Number 2, pp. Performance Evaluation of non?Markovian

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Estimating is a Learned Skill

Herding Cats

Estimating is a learned skill, used for any purpose from every-day life to management of projects. When I left for the airport this morning to catch my flight to a customer site I estimated, given the conditions, how much time I need to get to my favorite parking spot at DIA. So when you hear we can't estimate you'll know better.

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4 Fallacious Reasons to Estimate and Why Those Are Fallacious

Herding Cats

There's a recent post titled Four Fallacious Reasons to Estimate. It lists the usual suspects for why those spending the money think they don't have to estimate how much they plan to spend when they'll be done producing the value they've been assigned to produce for that expenditure. Let's look at each one in more detail.

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How to Estimate Any Software Problem

Herding Cats

ways to make decisions with No Estimates. can we make a decision in the presence of Uncertainty without making an estimate of the impact or outcome of that decision? What would be the evidence that we could make decisions in the presence of uncertanty without estimating the impacts and outcomes of those decisions? . Start here.

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More Reuse of Established Terms to Mean New Things

Herding Cats

The #NoEstimates Manifesto - Actually restates Best Practice for estimating and making decisions with those estimates. . Deterministic estimates are point estimates and Point estimates without a Variance are of little value in the presence of uncertainty. Estimates make use of a broad range of models and data .

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Reading List for the Cone of Uncertainty

Herding Cats

The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project’s outcome; it is to determine whether a project’s targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them ? 10 Deadly Sins of Software Estimation , Steve McConnell , Construx, 2002. Steve McConnell.

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There is Little New Under the Sun

Herding Cats

It is popular to claim we've never done this before, so how can we possibly estimate the cost and schedule. If it truly hasn't been done before, then the software project is likely to be an inventing new physics project. In that world, we still made estimates of the cost to design, build, and operate the experiment.