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In our projects we are often asked to give ball park estimates for activities. My question does it really help in taking decisions based on the estimate.
Yes as pointed out above.
No if the client later says "Oh, but that's much more than the X days you initially estimated"
You need to be careful in explaining and agreeing on what "ballpark" really means
Yes .. it can help to give rough estimates to the client but later on these estimates can show upto +/- 50% variation.
But it can help to gauge the size of the project and roughly manday efforts
Something to add to the existing responses.
Pros:
Helpful for a teamleader to assess
the number of resources needed for a
set of activities.
Useful to assess
whether a task would fit in a pre
defined timeline
Cons:
Very rough estimate
Need to be very careful while sharing with the customer.
I often use these ballpark estimates to give a quick price quote to a client, when based on models such as WMFP or COCOMO-II they can also help me make an unbiased assessment.
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It was asked by a interviewer.
The target is to Design a train tickets Reservation system. If the train go through 5 stations(e.g. A,B,C,D,E). We could sell tickets from A-E or A-B, if a ticket from A-B is sold, we could go on sell tickets between B-E.
The question is which data structure is suitable to present the seats? It should show which section is available for sale.
Thanks for help!
To be quite honest, "that interviewer's question, at least as it has been presented by you, makes very little sense." (Maybe the interviewer provided more details at-the-time that you have since forgotten.)
But the basic idea should be: "what is the fact that you need to represent?" Well, in this case, the "fact" is that user_X, on this_train, has a ticket to go from_station A, to_station B ... where "A" and "B" are enumerations such that you can easily determine when two stations "overlap."
From this, you can then proceed to define the various "bright-line rules" that the reservation system must be able to apply. For instance: "how many existing reservations overlap a certain range-of-stops?" (This will allow you to determine if the seat-capacity of the train would be exceeded.)
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We have standard issue tracking system (home grown for internal use only) and plan to add planing capabilities as all task have all necessary data to make estimation.
So each task have:
more or less accurate estimated time
accurate spent time
more or less accurate percentage completeness
accurate beginning/schedule date
task owner
Also we have scheduled version which is a group of tasks.
We don't know how to ask to question:
how many hours we must spend to release end
according to tasks time data and version schedule date?
or:
do we finish version to specified schedule?
PS Seems that percentage completeness is less accurate and we decide to drop it...
Estimation is trickier than it looks. For example, when people are asked to give time estimates, they generally systematically underestimate (it's called "optimism bias").
My best suggestion is that you should get a book on the topic and read it. McConnell's Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art is a good place to start.
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In your experience, what phase of software development takes the most time? That is besides maintenance, of course. And which phase takes the second most time? Which methodology do you use?
The final 20% always takes the longest - roughly 80% of the total time of the project.
I don't think there is any methodology that will change this. As a project begins to take its final form and is demoed its always easier for clients to think of new ideas and improvements. I think the best way to handle it is to keep open communication with the client, be open to change suggestions, but make sure they are aware that their changes will increase the development cost.
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In your practice, how do you effectively track and manage technical debt?
Is there a specific metric, like SLOC, that you use?
How do you visually display your results to stakeholders and management?
What benefits have you seen in the process?
We write story cards for technical debt. They are BLACK, with big yellow warning signs on them. Get too many on the wall, and it's REAL obvious.
Anyone who walks past can see them :)
We use #todo comments.
In Python, the epydoc tools format the #todo nicely.
We have a little code scanner that extracts the #todo comment lines. We push them into the backlog as work to be done.
I talk a little about some of the metrics used to identify technical debt in my blog entry below. Technical debt can mean much more than just code clean up items highlighted by TODO statements in code. The tracking mechanism will change depending on which risk indicator you're focused on.
http://blog.acrowire.com/technical-debt/technical-debt-part-2-identification/
There is a plug-in for Sonar that translates technical debt into $.
I haven't used it myself yet, but it looks promising.
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As a project manager, you are required to organize time so that the project meets a deadline.
Is there some sort of equations to use for estimating how long the development will take?
let's say the database
time = sql storedprocedures * tables manipulated or something similar
Or are you just stuck having to get the experience to get adequate estimations?
As project manager you have to remember that the best you will ever we be able to do on your own is give your best guess as to how long a given project will take. How accurate you are. depends on your experience and the scope of the project.
The only way I know of to get a reasonably accurate estimate that is it to break the project into individual tasks and get the developer who will be doing the actual work to put an estimate on each task. You can then use an evidence based algorithm that takes the estimation accuracy of each developer into account to give you the probability of hitting a given deadline.
If the probability is too low, you have two choices: remove features or move the deadline.
Further reading:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html
http://www.wordyard.com/2007/10/11/evidence-based-scheduling/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method
There's no set formula out there that I've seen that would really work. Fogbugz has its monte carlo simulator which has somewhat of a concept for this, but really, experience is going to be your best point of reference. Every developer and every project will be different!
There will be such a formula as soon as computers can start generating all code themselves. Until then you are stuck with human developers who all have different levels of skill and development speed.