How to cite this article: Lawrence, A. PM Network, 8 12 , 32— Reprints and Permissions. Automated estimating tools work well, but are not widely used, despite studies showing that most projects within data processing organizations either fail or are significantly over budget. The typical estimating process lacks consistent methodology. Most companies poorly document their project histories and don't stay current with the latest technologies.
Automated estimating tools enable the almost automatic archiving of project histories and the development of a project WBS. They facilitate the determination of task dependencies, and provide detailed estimates even for the lowest level WBS tasks. Good estimating tools allow risks to be assessed, and estimates and schedules to be validated.
They can act as catalysts to improving the estimating process, and help ensure project success. If a company has an estimating process at all, it probably contains some, but rarely all, of the following steps: 1.
Develop a project work breakdown structure WBS. Create a rough project plan to determine task dependencies. Develop a detailed estimate for the lowest level tasks in the WBS. Determine the staffing and the associated project duration. Assess risk and make some adjustment to the estimate. Validate the estimate by having others review it. Review it with management, marketing, client and end-users. This process doesn't really work well for the following reasons: Most companies do not have an estimating methodology and if they do it may not be consistently followed.
Most companies do not have a consistently followed project methodology; for example, an application development methodology. Most companies do a poor job of saving project results that they will need for estimating future projects.
Most companies do not analyze project results and use them to improve the estimating process. Most companies do not have a process to assess project risk and its impact on the project estimate and schedule.
Let us review the following proposed estimating process that uses automated estimating tools: Obtain available project details and your own project history. Automated estimating tools can make the process of saving and using your own history almost automatic. This can be done with many estimating tools.
Their estimates are based upon a project methodology and the methodology has a WBS that frequently can be modified to fit your own project approach. This means that the tool can help lead to a consistently used project methodology in your organization. Some estimating tools can greatly facilitate the determination of task dependencies and the associated critical path by interfacing with a project management tool.
This results in the WBS and actual resources only being entered in one place and not two. Therefore the project manager is much more likely to do a good job of determining the effect of task dependencies and critical path on the schedule.
Another benefit is that the initial plan can later be expanded to be the actual project plan. Automated estimating tools easily provide estimates and allow effortless what-if analysis.
In addition, their databases typically have a greater variety of project sizes, methods and technologies than any one company can have in their own history. Some tools even support task-by-task estimating in addition to their more sophisticated estimating methods.
As a result they can facilitate and formalize task-by-task estimating based upon your WBS. Determine the required staffing and the associated project duration. Some automated estimating tools allow you to enter the actual staff into the estimating tool and will support the interface to the project management tool. Therefore the staff dependencies can be entered into the project management tool and the resulting plan used by the estimating tool.
This is the real strength of the automated estimating tools. They can be used to validate your task-by-task, bottom-up estimate, independently, using industry standards, industry historical data bases and your own history. You can compare your estimate to these more standardized results. If your estimate varies significantly from the standard estimates, then it is necessary to reconcile the differences or change your estimate.
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Configuration management and version control are essential in a modern iterative development process. Much of the metrics approach recommended in Chapter 13 is dependent on measuring changes in software artifact baselines. Section Conventional approaches decomposed system requirements into subsystem requirements, subsystem requirements into component requirements, and component requirements into unit requirements.
The equal treatment of all requirements drained away engineering hours from the driving requirements, then wasted that time on paperwork associated with detailed traceability that was inevitably discarded later as the driving requirements and subsequent design understanding evolved.
In a modern process , the system requirements are captured in the vision statement. Lower levels of requirements are driven by the process—organized by iteration rather than by lower level component—in the form of evaluation criteria.
These criteria are typically captured by a set of use cases and other textually represented objectives. The vision statement captures the contract between the development group and the buyer.
This information should be evolving but slowly varying, across the life cycle, and should be represented in a form that is understandable to the buyer. The evaluation criteria are captured in the release specification artifacts, which are transient snapshots of objectives for a given iteration.
Iterative models allow the customer and the developer to work with tangible, evolving versions of the system. Pragmatically, requirements can—and must—be evolved along with an architecture and an evolving set of application increments. Rather than focus on consistency, completeness, and traceability of immature requirements specifications, projects need to focus on achieving the proper specification of the project vision and to evolve the lower level specifications through successive sets of evaluation criteria against the evolving design iterations.
The ramifications of this approach on the environment's support for requirements management are twofold:.
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