Estimation template for software project

My analysis of actual time spent on projects suggests otherwise. Sometimes it's closer to a third of the overall time and cost, or even less. What is bleeding the rest of the time and the cost on projects? Let's take a look. The time and effort needed to get to executable requirements is a classic source of underestimation.

By "executable", I mean having enough clarity and detail to the requirements that developers can take the ball and run with it. Many projects suffer from numerous "starts and stops" due to developers not knowing or understanding how to perform tasks due to unclear or incomplete requirements. This translates to wasted time as the team scrambles to find the people who know the answers to the questions, or who can make the needed decisions.

Meanwhile, development that should've been happening is not happening, and the estimate gets further and further from reality. If you're on the "Waterfall" side, it means making sure all the requirements details are shored up in advance of development, including assets such as wireframes, data tables, or copy decks, and everything is concretely defined, including business rules, validation messages, input and output parameters, and so forth.

This amounts to planning for what may be an intense and lengthy effort. For this reason many prefer a more "Agile" approach these days, which takes more of a "just-in-time" approach to requirements, and generally has requirements definition and development as overlapping, rather than sequential work phases. Although they are both running at the same time, keep in mind that it only works if the requirements work stream is running at least one step ahead of the development work stream, so that the developers always have something ready to work on.

If it is running one step behind , you waste time with the "start and stop" issues again. You can never completely get rid of problem-solving, research, and trouble-shooting in software development. It's the nature of the job. As such, everyday development is rife with trading emails, conversations in the hallway, brainstorming in front of whiteboards, reviews and meetings both impromptu and scheduled, and so forth.

It's part and parcel of "getting things done", but it's a time sink, albeit a necessary one. If a team of nine people meet for an hour to solve a problem, it's valuable, but it's still nine man-hours spent on something other than development.

That's the cost of collaboration, as is every interaction required to get the job done. The more complex a project, the more collaboration is needed. Be sure to account for the time people need to spend interacting. As mentioned earlier, quality means many things, and part of understanding its cost is to take an inventory of what it means for you.

For me, it means:. I could go on, but you get the idea. Each of these is a dedicated effort. Note that they form a "wrapper" around each development task that can be as significant of an effort as the development task itself. If you are doing something novel or custom, you should also factor in time for:.

Furthermore, expect it to take repeated effort to reach a "ready to launch" status. Every project has bugs that need to be found and fixed, or revisions that will be asked for. It is an iterative process , with inevitable back-and-forth, and the more time is spent testing and reviewing things, the more issues may be found to deal with. Tracking how many rounds of QA are needed or how many revisions are requested on a project is a fascination of mine.

In my experience, requiring rounds of QA or weeks to knock out functional and design issues on a website launch is not unusual. Your mileage will vary, depending on the type of situation and the stakeholders you're dealing with I like to call this variable the "Client Coefficient".

Of course, anything you can do to "bake in" quality throughout the development process or review things in advance will help this go quicker.

A common mistake I see in estimates is assuming a quick and easy deployment, once the project is "done". This is sometimes the case; but other times, I have seen deployments cause an immense amount of last-minute trouble, and right when it's most inconvenient. Chalk it up to "Murphy's Law", but don't think it will never happen to you. I've seen occasions when a particular bug or hardware problem related only to deployment was found right when a project was supposed to go "live"--and ended up needing days to troubleshoot, submit support tickets, or find workarounds, holding up projects that were "on track" up to that point.

Plan ahead by building out a checklist of deployment tasks, assessing each for risk, and allowing adequate time to perform them. Mitigate the risks by allocating time to set up staging servers, perform trial runs and put contingency and monitoring plans in place. In short, the more critical the deployment, the more thought should be put into its planning and estimation. Assessing risk in general is a key part of estimating. Too often we assume "best case scenarios" without stopping to think about the things that might go wrong or cause difficulty.

This doesn't mean we have to be pessimistic about everything, just that we should be realistic that some events out of our control are likely to occur, as well as some unanticipated difficulties. We have to be sensitive to when and where those risks are greatest. Here are some potential sources of elevated risk and uncertainty:. Legacy code. This includes code written by someone other than your current developers, or any old or deprecated technology which is still in service.

Anywhere a lack of familiarity or currency exists, the chances of misjudging are high. Code with technical debt. Technical debt is a serious issue, and every project manager and development team needs to recognize why and when it is incurred. If you suspect technical debt has been incurred in the past, remember it alway means extra cost and effort to pay down or deal with in the future. Untried methods.

Any time you are trying something new which you haven't done before, consider the potential for required research, trial and error, and troubleshooting. External dependencies. If you are highly dependent on a third-party product, service, or vendor, consider the impact of a disruption, unexpected problem, or discovery that something is not supported.

It may be cause for doing extra due diligence or planning for contingencies. Volatile requirements. If the requirements are subject to change quickly due to market unpredictability or an influx of new information. If it must be addressed now instead of later, time for retooling or refinement may be required. You will need to analyze the specifics of your own project tasks to determine additional risks. The estimate for a task should reflect its inherent risk and uncertainty.

This can be difficult because we don't know, ahead of time, whether a particular task will go smoothly or not; how do we predict a specific outcome? This is where buffering makes sense. In math and science, an analogous concept is the "confidence interval". It makes sense to add a reasonable confidence interval to this baseline if we want to ensure a high probability of falling within the estimate.

This method has you come up with two estimates for every task: what you consider to be a "baseline" estimate i. Note how this is superior to simply "padding" an estimate; it calculates the buffer for each task based on the amount of uncertainty inherent to that task.

This is a more empirical and less arbitrary approach to buffering. I've often seen project managers who supplied an estimate as a total number, or as hours by role, asked to explain themselves to shocked or skeptical stakeholders who don't understand why the estimate is so high.

The best way to handle this drama is to avoid it, which you can easily do if you are transparent with how the estimate was arrived at. The way to do that is to show an outline of how it all breaks down, particularly any "hidden tasks" that people may take for granted.

I generally build a template to do just that in either MS Excel or Project. Below are a few examples using MS Project. These are fictional projects with fictional tasks, and simplified for the sake of brevity. However, they illustrate the basic idea. Here is a breakdown of activities by phases of the "SDLC":. In this next example, I break down the back-and-forth "revision and review" process inherent to the typical requirements or design effort.

This captures some of the "cost of collaboration" and is important when the number of "rounds" it takes matters:.

Finally, whenever incremental variables affect the estimate, I always prefer to itemize them out rather than batch them together. That's because they represent "variable costs" and and I don't want them to be misinterpreted as "fixed costs". If your estimate is contingent on how many website pages you're building, for example, or how many customers you're supporting, or anything that could be added to at the last minute, whether intentionally or not, you need a rationale for why it affects the estimate.

Listing things out makes it clearer what the estimate does and does not include:. The actual estimates for each line could be in hours, days, or even weeks, that is for you to decide. The point is that the more you can do to do make your estimate easy to understand at a glance, the more efficiently you can get through the presentation and acceptance process.

This is a real fear for organizations trying to hit aggressive targets. It contributes to planning fallacy, because it makes us worry about overestimating , and the potential waste that will occur if we do. The fact is, most of the time we think we're overestimating, we're actually underestimating; but in the case that we do, we should turn it into a benefit instead of a liability. We can do that by setting "stretch goals" for the estimate that are not promised, but will be delivered as "extras" if time permits.

In other words, any overestimation should be used to deliver more than what was expected. This could be in the form of extra features, extra "polish" to features, or even just launching early. If the estimate turns out to be adequate only for the original scope then no harm is done; but if you do manage to perform under the estimate, then consistently providing additional value is the way to prove to everyone that they need not worry about Parkinson's Law.

If there's one truism about estimates, it's that someone always wants them to be lower, and you may feel pressured to do that. Your analysis will be for nought, however, if you modify your estimate under duress because someone had a poor reaction to it.

To avoid this fate, it is best to be prepared for it in advance. This means having a plan for when your estimate gets a "no", as well as understanding how to say "no" to unwise concessions. To effectively navigate such conversations, you must not take anything personally. Take it as a rational debate on specific concerns, and nothing more. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that arguing your side means acting or coming across as belligerent, unpleasant, or self-centered.

It's quite the opposite. By defending your estimate you are actually proving that you care about all parties. If you are truly interested in the project being a success, than defending a good estimate is a sacred trust. Basically you want to do four things:.

First, you need to convince others that you really are trying to estimate objectively, with the success of the project in mind, and that your method makes sense. Don't feel bad if others imply that you must prove this; it's all part of the game when time and money are at stake. This is where all the analysis you've done becomes useful a second time; just walk everyone through it. When you show everyone exactly how your estimate breaks down, and explain the rationale behind each part, it will put people at ease.

Just seeing the details and hearing a strong explanation is convincing enough for most. If there is disagreement in an area, you should discuss it point by point instead of arguing over the estimate as a whole.

A big part of getting on the same page is about agreeing on a quality standard and the level of effort necessary to reach it. What often happens is that stakeholders either haven't considered or don't understand the amount of extra time and work involved to reach the quality level they desire. A project estimate in the planning phase may increase a lot of accuracies. Preceding to the execution of the project and providing the sufficient project planning being conducted, the project estimate may be as accurate up to ten percent.

You can also see Blank Estimate Templates. The accuracy of your cost estimation process can make or break the success of your project. One of the greatest challenges for any project leader is to effectively deliver on all aspects of his project both according to the specifications mentioned by his client which should be within the allotted budget. It is often the case that either one of the aspects or the other can be accomplished, but not always both of them.

It might be extremely challenging to estimate any project as projects by definition tend to be unique in nature, often a new product, service or many a times business change. Download now. What is the Project Estimation? Include potential variations in estimates. Use alternative pricing models. Consider possible future changes. Akveo Project Estimation Template Features Free estimate forms empower managers with the following set of crucial features:.

How Does the Estimating Template Work? Related Articles To have a deeper understanding of the software development project estimation, check out the following fresh materials.

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