Questions tagged [estimation]
Estimation is the process of finding an estimate, or approximation, which is a value that is usable for some purpose even if input data may be incomplete, uncertain, or unstable.
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doubt about relationship between poker planning and ideal days
I am new to Scrum and I have been reading the book of Kenneth entitled "Essential Scrum" and I have some doubts regarding the poker planning.
I understand the mechanics of the game, and for what I ...
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What is difference between a Screen and View in COCOMO-II model?
My question is related to software cost estimation. In Software Engineering, COCOMO I or II, are for investigating cost, effort, deployment of staff and ascertaining an accurate road map of precise ...
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Should technical debt/technology upgrade be scheduled as a feature (given points) or a chore (given no points)?
What should we do for user stories for technical debt in Pivotal Tracker? Should we consider these as features (giving points) or as chores (giving no points, thus lowering velocity)?
I am confused ...
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Counting function points
I am performing a function point analysis (FPA) for a project. I am completely new to this process and have started with only the login and authentication modules to validate the results I get.
I ...
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Performance: Looping on data on the server or getting data looped on clients via socket connection
I have a web application the mobile app users are connected it by using websocket.
The server has data A that can be changed in time. And the clients (mobile app) have data B that also can be changed ...
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How is programmer capability measured in COCOMO II?
COCOMO II expresses programmer capability as a different factor than technology experience. How does it measure programmer capability while abstracting his language and tools experience?
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How much time/labor is spent setting up, and publishing a cross-platform mobile app? [closed]
Let me provide an imaginary scenario so that my question is fully understood. Let's assume you are an experienced cross-platform developer for iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.
Someone asks you to ...
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Cost of Cloud Vendor Lock-In
Consider a greenfield development situation where cloud tools are being considered vs. in-house solutions, in the vein of AWS SQS vs. self-hosted Kafka, ECS vs. Mesos-Marathon, Lambda/Azure Functions ...
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Estimating time costs in legacy codebase
Recently I started working on a project where a very old monolithic application is being migrated into microservice-based architecture.
The legacy codebase is very messy ('spaghetti code') and often ...
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How do I know how much to bill and how long a software development project will take, before analysis? [closed]
In software development we usually do a analysis phase where requirements are taken, user interfaces are designed (for software with ui), etc. After the analysis phase you know what to do, and you can ...
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how can user story maps be used for projects with heavy backend work and little UI
Background
I'm a huge fan/believer of Jeff Patton's user story map. I'm currently reading his book..
I find using story maps a very effective way in convincing clients to use the lean start-up ...
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Which principle is it to fetch only needed data?
It often makes sense to "fetch only what you need" for example if I should display only 10 rows of data then I should not fetch the entire data set because it would waste resources for a large data ...
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Should tester's time be included when estimating tickets?
When creating time estimates for tickets should the time taken for testers (QAs) be included in a tickets estimate? We have previously always estimated without the testers time but we are talking ...
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When it is worth it to spend RAM for computational speed? [closed]
I am developing data analytics algorithms that are supposed to process large amounts of data.
Thus I am aiming to develop my mathematics already in such a way that it is possible to distribute the ...
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Mechanical State Estimator design
I want to write a library for Mechanical State Estimation of a vehicle. This is, estimate variables as position, velocity an so on, using the information provided by different sensor measurements (GPS,...
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When creating time estimates for features, is there a standard percentage to tack on for potential refactoring?
Note: I get that refactoring is something you do along the way, you don't treat it as it's own "thing", or it's own specific task. I am talking about refactoring along the way, however I am not sure ...
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How to estimate SLOC for project that has no source code yet?
Recently, I've been getting familiar with COCOMO II model to calculate the effort (person-months) and duration (calendar time in months) required to develop a mobile application. To calculate the ...
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How to estimate bug fixes?
How can you actually determine the size of fixing something which is broken in an unknown way? I tell people in my classes I only know two sizes for defect fixes: 1) Trivial because I already know ...
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Is DRY the enemy of software project management?
One of the most basic and widely accepted principles of software development is DRY (don't repeat yourself). It is also clear that most software projects require some kind of management.
Now what are ...
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Amount of routine work in software development and its effect on estimation
I am convinced that the amount of routine work in software development is - and should be - relatively small, if not negligible, and that this is the fundamental problem of software estimation.
Let ...
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What do you do to articulate your benefit as a programmer in an organisation where you are a cost-centre? [closed]
In my organisation I build financial products, for mutual funds, 401Ks, life insurance and margin-loans (or the equivalent in my jurisdiction).
I take feature/epic requests from product managers - ...
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Is there a relation factor between meeting time and saving development time?
I am working on a project and we have regular (usually weekly), informal meetings, where we discuss the status of the project and the GUI of it.
I'm the only developer there, the other 4-5 people ...
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How should we quote differing sized contracts in a SCRUM environment
I am trying to implement an agile-ish approach to our firm. Right now we have a very much waterfall like approach to designing, coding, testing, and releasing. One major issue we haven't found an ...
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Are bargaining and beat down attempts on Scrum estimations legitimate parts of the process?
I noticed in scrum meetings, that developers often give realistic estimations on stories. However, even rather simple stories need a lot efforts for configuration, setting up third party components, ...
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Why are we anyway doing Software Estimation knowing it is broken? [duplicate]
This is one SW development problem that hits the sea of developers as they crash into the rocks of management. Somewhere down the line the estimate given by the programmer gets translated to a date ...
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How can I make a boss (or colleague) be more careful when estimating the complexity of a task/project?
I am a software developer, and I work in a small web development company. It seems to be a recurring theme that a middle-manager will ask me how long something will take, and when I give them my ...
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Concrete alternatives to inverse relationship between project completion time and number of developers?
Background
It is now well understood (if not always well communicated) that the following logic does not apply to software development project estimates:
A project that would take 1 developer 12 ...
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How to know if I'm slow or fast at programming?
I understand that it's extremely depends on a particular case, but I really would like to know at least roughly how long a specific task can take for completion to average programmer. Is there any ...
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Complicated constant in "The Software Equation"?
Why are the constants in The Software Equation so complicated?
Here is the equation.
where
E = Project effort measured in person-months or person-years
LOC =Lines of Code estimate for the project
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What is a good way to make estimates clear to the customer?
So me and my team have been doing estimates for a new project but we have been getting the feeling lately that the customer has trouble understanding not the estimates in itself but what the stories ...
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Requirements and Documentation in Agile
My company has recently started to take on smaller software development projects. Typically small web applications to be used on a client's intranet. They are usually 3-5 months work in total.
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In Scrum, are story points assigned at different planning poker sessions worth the same?
As far as I understand, a planning poker session usually is started by picking one item and assigning it a value (say, 1). This item will then serve as a reference for the rest of the session. From ...
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How to include estimating and its effect on prioritization with Kanban?
I've read in several sources about Kanban. Using Atlassian's description as my current main source of information about how it works, I wonder how the effects of estimations on prioritization should ...
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Estimating in groups - How to extract useful statistics / estimates?
As many other projects we have to estimate our jira tasks up front. This is obviously not fun and I've started hacking on a simple webapp to "gameify" this tedious process.
My idea is that an issue ...
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What document/artifact should alert me when an old requirement changes the scope of new one?
I developed a software application a year ago, I delivered it with a simple documentation.
For example, it has an special and complicated login system as requirement.
Now the customer calls and ask ...
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When estimating with a fresh team on a new project, is there a reason not to use default velocity for estimating?
Generally when estimating using an Agile points system on an experienced project team, the points have meaning relative based on past experience - that take into account:
understanding of the ...
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COCOMO II SLOC count for web application development
What type of SLOC do you take into account for estimating web application development projects with COCOMO II?
For instance, suppose you have to estimate a web application project that will probably ...
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Misunderstanding about "Evidence Based Scheduling" in estimation tasks
I read the Spolsky blog the post with title "Evidence based scheduling" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html) but I don't understand the mechanism to predict and estimate interruptions....
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Do I need to estimate maintenance software issues? [closed]
The PM of the company I work on, always asks me to estimate maintenance issues and since there are several legacy systems that I didn't build, makes this hard to get.
He says getting estimations for ...
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Is using up 'too much' storage space a practical concern when storing only text in a database in 2015? [closed]
I originally started writing a question on StackOverflow about a clever way to optimise keeping a version history of large text fields in a relational database table, possibly by using deltas instead ...
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How can I get the transit time for packets for a jitter buffer?
I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept of a real jitter buffer. I'm basing the only knowledge that I have around this article:
http://toncar.cz/Tutorials/VoIP/VoIP_Basics_Jitter.html
This ...
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How to deal with outlier programmers during sprint planning?
It is generally accepted that the best programmers produce at least an order of magnitude more than average ones. This seems like it would cause problems with the usual approaches to sprint planning ...
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Estimating scrum points for non cross-functional team
We are working to transition our development team to be more Agile. I have a question about story point estimation and their relationship to an individual's skill.
The scenario is that our team ...
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Time estimating of a complex bug investigation (not a straight-forward one) [duplicate]
(It is not a duplicate: Bug investigation is much more non-deterministic than a defined development task where things to be done are specified. Investigation is about narrowing a huge search space, ...
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What to tell a manager who tells your estimates are too much for a genuine task [duplicate]
My manager keeps complaining that the estimates we have come up with are too much for the customer — every time he asks us to think like a customer and see whether the estimate is valid, but my point ...
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Should we estimate tasks during backlog grooming?
I was just taken by surprise in a backlog grooming meeting when we assigned time estimates to BA, dev, and QA tasks...but the story is not yet scheduled in any sprint and we are not yet assigning ...
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How to budget for a programmer you're not ready to hire yet? [closed]
I am trying to work up a budget for an app, specifically a budget for hiring a third-party programmer to add a specific feature, and I'm trying to figure out how to get a decent number. The ...
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Software development costs and influences [closed]
I had a conversation with a friend who is a civil engineer the other day regarding (lack of) planning in software projects. I said that before the construction phase of a software development project, ...
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Maintenance cost of SIMD programming code base
Question:
The software industry's consensus is that clean and simple code is fundamental to the long-term viability of the code base and the organization that owns it. These properties lead to lower ...
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Scrum: Capacity vs Velocity when planning a sprint
We have completed 11 sprints so far in our current project. In most sprints we have not been burning down well and usually finish with our velocity gradient flattening as we approach the end of the ...
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