Formula to estimate time to build SCSF-CAB / WPF-Composite - estimation

In my company management is looking for screen-pumping-machine/production-line-factory for data centric (form entry) windows apps. And I am for the task to build the tool that should automate the estimations given the technical requirements.
I am trying to build a formula to estimate time to build web apps (ASPNET MVC, etc). Since the break-down activity list is kind of standard.
I wanted to know if someone out there had to build a tool like this for making his/her estimations before.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to work time estimations in the SE world.
You can do a gut-check based on your own capabilities and the time it took you to do similar things, but that's about it. You can track metrics on project/work time and attempt to extrapolate, but you'll need really good data to do any good projections.

Related

Choosing a strategy for BI module

The company I work for produces a content management system (CMS) with different various add-ons for publishing, e-commerce, online printing, etc. We are now in process of adding "reporting module" and I need to investigate which strategy should be followed. The "reporting module" is otherwise known as Business Intelligence, or BI.
The module is supposed to be able to track item downloads, executed searches and produce various reports out of it. Actually, it is not that important what kind of data is being churned as in the long term we might want to be able to push whatever we think is needed and get a report out of it.
Roughly speaking, we have two options.
Option 1 is to write a solution based on Apache Solr (specifically, using https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-236). Pros of this approach:
free / open source / good quality
we use Solr/Lucene elsewhere so we know the domain quite well
total flexibility over what is being indexed as we could take incoming data (in XML format), push it through XSLT and feed it to Solr
total flexibility of how to show search results. Similar to step above, we could have custom XSLT search template and show results back in any format we think is necessary
our frontend developers are proficient in XSLT so fitting this mechanism for a different customer should be relatively easy
Solr offers realtime / full text / faceted search which are absolutely necessary for us. A quick prototype (based on Solr, 1M records) was able to deliver search results in 55ms. Our estimated maximum of records is about 1bn of rows (this isn't a lot for typical BI app) and if worse comes to worse, we can always look at SolrCloud, etc.
there are companies doing very similar things using Solr (Honeycomb Lexicon, for example)
Cons of this approach:
SOLR-236 might or might not be stable, moreover, it's not yet clear when/if it will be released as a part of official release
there would possibly be some stuff we'd have to write to get some BI-specific features working. This sounds a bit like reinventing the wheel
the biggest problem is that we don't know what we might need in the future (such as integration with some piece of BI software, export to Excel, etc.)
Option 2 is to do an integration with some free or commercial piece of BI software. So far I have looked at Wabit and will have a look at QlikView, possibly others. Pros of this approach:
no need to reinvent the wheel, software is (hopefully) tried and tested
would save us time we could spend solving problems we specialize in
Cons:
as we are a Java shop and our solution is cross-platform, we'd have to eliminate a lot of options which are in the market
I am not sure how flexible BI software can be. It would take time to go through some BI offerings to see if they can do flexible indexing, real time / full text search, fully customizable results, etc.
I was told that open source BI offers are not mature enough whereas commercial BIs (SAP, others) cost fortunes, their licenses start from tens of thousands of pounds/dollars. While I am not against commercial choice per se, it will add up to the overall price which can easily become just too big
not sure how well BI is made to work with schema-less data
I am definitely not be the best candidate to find the most approprate integration option in the market (mainly because of absence of knowledge in BI area), however a decision needs to be done fast.
Has anybody been in a similar situation and could advise on which route to take, or even better - advise on possible pros/cons of the option #2? The biggest problem here is that I don't know what I don't know ;)
I have spent some time playing with both QlikView and Wabit, and, have to say, I am quite disappointed.
I had an expectation that the whole BI industry actually has some science under it but from what I found this is just a mere buzzword. This MSDN article was actually an eye opener. The whole business of BI consists of taking data from well-normalized schemas (they call it OLTP), putting it into less-normalized schemas (OLAP, snowflake- or star-type) and creating indices for every aspect you want (industry jargon for this is data cube). The rest is just some scripting to get the pretty graphs.
OK, I know I am oversimplifying things here. I know I might have missed many different aspects (nice reports? export to Excel? predictions?), but from a computer science point of view I simply cannot see anything beyond a database index here.
I was told that some BI tools support compression. Lucene supports that, too. I was told that some BI tools are capable of keeping all index in the memory. For that there is a Lucene cache.
Speaking of the two candidates (Wabit and QlikView) - the first is simply immature (I've got dozens of exceptions when trying to step outside of what was suggested in their demo) whereas the other only works under Windows (not very nice, but I could live with that) and the integration would likely to require me to write some VBScript (yuck!). I had to spend a couple of hours on QlikView forums just to get a simple date range control working and failed because the Personal Edition I had did not support downloadable demo projects available on their site. Don't get me wrong, they're both good tools for what they have been built for, but I simply don't see any point of doing integration with them as I wouldn't gain much.
To address (arguable) immatureness of Solr I will define an abstract API so I can move all the data to a database which supports full text queries if anything goes wrong. And if worse comes to worse, I can always write stuff on top of Solr/Lucene if I need to.
If you're truly in a scenario where you're not sure what you don't know i think it's best to explore an open-source tool and evaluate its usefulness before diving into your own implementation. It could very well be that using the open-source solution will help you further crystallise your own understanding and required features.
I had worked previously w/ an open-source solution called Pentaho. I seriously felt that I understood a whole lot more by learning to use Pentaho's features for my end. Of course, as is the case of working w/ most of the open-source solutions, Pentaho seemed to be a bit intimidating at first, but I managed to get a good grip of it in a month's time. We also worked with Kettle ETL tool and Mondrian cubes - which I think most of the serious BI tools these days build on top of.
Earlier, all these components were independent, but off-late i believe Pentaho took ownership of all these projects.
But once you're confident w/ what you need and what you don't, I'd suggest building some basic reporting tool of your own on top of a mondrian implementation. Customising a sophisticated open-source tool can indeed be a big issue. Besides, there are licenses to be wary of. I believe Pentaho is GPL, though you might want to check on that.
First you should make clear what your reports should show. Which reporting feature do you need? Which output formats do you want? Do you want show it in the browser (HTML) or as PDF or with an interactive viewer (Java/Flash). Where are the data (database, Java, etc.)? Do you need Ad-Hoc reporting or only some hard coded reports? This are only some questions.
Without answers to this question it is difficult to give a real recommendation, but my general recommendation would be i-net Clear Reports (used to be called i-net Crystal-Clear). It is a Java tool. It is a commercial tool but the cost are lower as SAP and co.

Measure development platform effeciency

We are devloping an application that is a kind of development tool for developing Line Of Buisness applications. The current applications that we build are windows desktop clients but we are looking into also targeting silverlight / cloud kind of applications.
What we are looking for is a "standard" way of measuring the time to build an application of medium to large complexity. The "easy" way would be to build two versions of an application, one using "standard" tools, like VS and components, and one using our platform, but I'm looking for a more efficient way to measure smaller parts and still be able to get some useful metrics of how much time could be saved using our product.
Do you guys have any pointers for me to look at, and what to test etc?
Everything that can be counted is a potential mesure. LOC, classes, components, dependencies etc, etc.
You specifically ask about "time measure" withouth actually masuring the time. Well, if you are going to document the time, then measuring the time is the only way to go. If you want to estimate or predict the time you think will be spent, then you could use some prediction tool. The COCOMO model is perhaps the best known model. This model uses LOC as the essential input, and some additional calibration parameters, like complexity, type of system, personell experience and historical calibration.
The original model has been redesigned (essentially including more parameters) and is refered to as COCOMO II. And the original model is renamed to COCOMO 81 (Boehm published the first model in 1981).
You'll find a lot of info if you google COCOMO.
The Wikipedia article is probably one of the first hits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO

How to measure software development performance? [closed]

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 6 years ago.
Improve this question
I am looking after some ways to measure the performance of a software development team. Is it a good idea to use the build tool? We use Hudson as an automatic build tool. I wonder if I can take the information from Hudson reports and obtain from it the progress of each of the programmers.
The main problem with performance metrics like this, is that humans are VERY good at gaming any system that measures their own performance to maximize that exact performance metric - usually at the expense of something else that is valuable.
Lets say we do use the hudson build to gather stats on programmer output. What could you look for, and what would be the unintended side effects of measuring that once programmers are clued onto it?
Lines of code (developers just churn out mountains of boilerplate code, and other needless overengineering, or simply just inline every damn method)
Unit test failures (don't write any unit tests, then they won't fail)
Unit test coverage (write weak tests that exercise the code, but don't really test it properly)
Number of bugs found in their code (don't do any coding, then you won't get bugs)
Number of bugs fixed (choose the easy/trivial bugs to work on)
Actual time to finish a task based against their own estimate (estimate higher to give more room)
And it goes on.
The point is, no matter what you measure, humans (not just programmers) get very good at optimizing to meet exactly that thing.
So how should you look at the performance of your developers? Well, that's hard. And it involves human managers, who are good at understanding people (and the BS they pull), and can look at each person subjectively in the context of who/where/what they are to figure out if they are doing a good job or not.
What you do once you've figured out who is/isn't performing is a whole different question though.
(I can't take credit for this line of thinking. It's originally from Joel Spolsky. Here and here)
Do NOT measure the performance of each individual programmer simply using the build tool. You can measure the team as a whole, sure, or you can certainly measure the progress of each programmer, but you cannot measure their performance with such a tool. Some modules are more complicated than others, some programmers are tasked with other projects, etc. It's not a recommended way of doing this, and it will encourage programmers to write sloppy code so that it looks like they did the most work.
No.
Metrics like that are doomed to failure. Different people work on different parts of the code, on different classes of problem, and absolute measurements are misleading at best.
The way to measure developer performance is to have excellent managers that do their job well, have good specs that accurately reflect requirements, and track everyone's progress carefully against those specs.
It's hard to do right. A software solution won't work.
I think this needs a very careful approach when deciding the ways to measure developers performance as most the traditional methods such as line of codes, number of check ins, number of bugs fixed etc. are proven to be subjective with todays software engineering concepts. We need to value team performance approach rather measuring individual KPIs in a project. However working in commercial development environment its important to keep a track and a close look at following factors of individual developers;
Code review comments – Each project, we can decide the number of code reviews need to be conducted for a given period. Based on the code reviews individuals get remarks about their coding standard improvements. Recurring issues of code reviews of same individual’s code needs to be brought in to attention. You can use automated code reviews tools or manual code reviews.
Test coverage and completeness of tests. – The % covered needs to be decided upfront and if certain developer fails to attempt it often, it needs to be taken care of.
Willingness to sign in to complex tasks and deliver them without much struggle
Achieving what’s defined as “Done” in a user story
Mastery level of each technical area.
With agile approach in some of the projects, the measurements of the development team and the expected performance are decided based on the releases. At each release planning there are different ‘contracts’ negotiated with the team members for the expected performance. I find this approach is more successful as there is no reason of adhering to UI related measurements in a release where there is a complex algorithm to be released.
I would NOT recommend using build tool information as a way to measure the performance / progress of software developers. Some of the confounding problems: possibly one task is considerably harder than another; possibly one task is much more involved in "design space" than "implementation space"; possibly (probably) the more efficient solution is the better solution, but that better solution contributes less lines of code than a terribly inefficient one which provides many many more lines of code; etc.
Speaking of KPI in software developers. www.smartKPIs.com may be a good resource for you. It contains a user friendly library of well-documented performance measures. At the moment it lists over 3300 KPI examples, grouped in 73 functional areas, as well as 83 industries and sub-categories.
KPI examples for the software developers are available on this page www.smartKPIs.com - application development They include but not limited to:
Defects removal efficiency
Data redundancy
In addition to examples of performance measures, www.smartKPIs.com also contains a catalogue of performance reports that illustrate the use of KPIs in practice.
Examples of such reports for information technology are available on: www.smartKPIs.com - KPIs in practice - information technology
The website is updated daily with new content, so check it from time to time for additional content.
Please note that while examples of performance measures are useful to inform decisions, each performance measure needs to be selected and customized based on the objectives and priorities of each organisation.
You would probably do better measuring how well your team tracks to schedules. If a team member (or entire team) is consistantly late, you will need to work with them to improve performance.
Don't short-cut or look for quick and easy ways to measure performance/progress of developers. There are many many factors that affect the output of a developer. I've seen alot of people try various metrics ...
Lines of code produced - encourages developers to churn out inefficient garbage
Complexity measures - encourages over analysis and refactoring
Number of bugs produced - encourages people to seek out really simple tasks and to hate your testers
... the list goes on.
When reviewing a developer you really need to look at how good their work is and define "good" in the context of what the comany needs and what situations/positions the company has put that indivual in. Progress should be evaluated with equal consideration and thought.
There are many different ways of doing this. Entire books written on the subject. You could use reports from Hudson but I think that would lead to misinformation and provide crude results. Really you need to have task tracking methodology.
Check how many lines of the codes each has written.
Then fire the bottom 70%.. NO 90%!... EVERY DAY!
(for the folks that aren't sure, YES, I am joking. Serious answer here)
We get 360 feedback from everyone on the team. If all your team members think you are crap, then you probably are.
There is a common mistake that many businesses make when setting up their release management tool. The Salesforce release management toolkit is one of the best ones available in the market today, but if you do not follow the vital steps of setting it up, you will definitely have some very bad results. You will get to use it but not to its full capacity. Establishing release management processes in isolation from the business processes is one of the worst mistakes to make. Release management tools go hand in hand with the enterprise strategy, objectives, governance, change management plus some other aspects. The processes of release management need to be formed in such a way that everyone in the business is on the same page.
Goals of release management
The main goal of release management is to have a consistent set of reliable and repeatable processes that are resource independent. This enables the achievement of the most favorable business value while at the same time optimizing the utilization of resources available. Considering that most organizations focus on running short, high-yield business projects, it is essential for optimization of the delivery value chain of the application to make certain that there are no holdups in the delivery of the business value.
Take for instance the force.com migration toolkit, as this tool has proven to be great in governance. A release management tool should allow for optimal visibility and accountability in governance.
Processes and release cycles
The release management processes must be consistent for the whole business. It is necessary to have streamlined and standardized processes across the various tool users. This is because they will be using the same platform and resources that enable efficient completion of their tasks. Having different processes for different divisions of your business can lead to grievous failures in tool management. The different sets of users will need to have visibility into what the others are doing. As aforementioned, visibility is of great importance in any business process.
When it comes to the release cycles, it is also imperative to have one centralized system that will track all the requirements of the different sets of users. It is also necessary to have this system centralized so that software development teams get insight into the features and changes requested by the business. Requests have to become priorities to make sure that the business gets to enjoy maximum benefit. Having a steering team is important because it is involved in the reviewing of business requirements plus also prioritizing the most appropriate changes that the business needs to make.
The changes that should happen to the Salesforce system can be very tricky and therefore having a regular meet up between the business and IT is good. This will help to determine the best changes to make to the system that will benefit the business. By considering the cost and value of implementing a feature, the steering committee has the task of deciding on the most important feature changes to make.
Here also good research http://intersog.com/blog/tech-tips/how-to-manage-millennials-on-software-development-teams
This is an old question but still, something you can do is borrow Velocity from Agile Software Development, where you assign a weight to each task and then you calculate how much "weight" you solve in each sprint (or iteration or whatever DLC you use). Of course this comes in hand with the fact that, like a commenter mentioned before, you need to actively keep track yourself of whether your developers are working or chatting online.
If you know your developers are working responsively, then you can rely on that velocity to give you an estimate of how much work the team can do. If at any iteration this number drops (considerably), then either it was poorly estimated or the team worked less.
Ultimately, the use of KPIs together with velocity can give you per-developer (or per-team) insights on performance.
Typically, directly using metrics for performance measurement is considered a Bad Idea, and one of the easy ways to run a team into the ground.
Now, you can use metrics like % of projects completed on-time, % of churn as code goes toward completion, etc...it's a wide field.
Here's an example:
60% of mission-critical bugs were written by Joe. That's a simple, straightforward metric. Fire Joe, right?
But wait, there's more!
Joe is the Senior Developer. He's the only guy trusted to write ultra-reliable code, every time. He's written about 80% of the mission-critical software, because he's the best.
Metrics are a bad measurement of developers.
I would share my experience and how I learnt a very valuable process on measuring the team performance. I must admit, I have fallen on tracking KPI simply because most of the departments would do the same but not really for the insight until I had the responsibility to evaluate developers performance where after a number of reading I evolved with the following solution.
One every project, I would entertain the team in a discussion on the project requirements and involve them so everyone knows what is to be done. In the same discussion through collaboration we would break the projects in to tasks and weight those tasks. Now previously we would estimate the project completion as 100% where each task has a percentage contribution. Well this did work for a while but was not the best solution. Now we would based the task on weight or points to be exact and use relative measurements to compare the task and differentiate the weights for example. There is a requirement to develop a web form to gather user data.
Task would go about like
1. User Interface - 2 Points
2. Database CRUD - 5 Points
3. Validation - 4 Points
4. Design (css) - 3 Points
With this strategy We can pin point a weekly approximate on how much we have completed and what is pending on the task force. We can also be able to pin point who has performed best.
I must admit that I still face some challenges on this strategy such as not every developer is comfortable on every technology. Somehow some are excited to learn technologies simply because they find 2015 high % of points fall in that section some would do what they can.
Remember, do not track a KPI for their own sake, track it for it's insight.

Coming up with time/staff required estimates for converting a desktop app into a client-server app

My boss is bidding on a project to convert a desktop application into one that runs online as a client-server application. The original app has a little more than a quarter of a million lines of C++ (MFC) code that's not cleanly divided between engine and front-end.
I need to come up with estimates of how long it will take and how many people would be needed for such a project. We don't have anyone on staff capable of doing this project, and we don't have any Windows machines, so we'd have to subcontract/outsource.
Alternatively, what arguments can I use to convince my boss that this project is a bad idea?
I would take a very long time, as most likely, you would have to change languages. It would basically be a complete rewrite. You may even just be better off defining what the old system did, and rewrite it from scratch, only referring to the old code when you need to duplicate business logic.
Without a clear division between the engine and the front-end, it's a bad idea. Giving over the code to a contractor or such would require a large amount of training just to understand the code, including parts that are meant to be rewritten as web apps.
You would first need to estimate how long it would take to clearly define that boundary, and then you can work out how long the rest of the project would take. That way you can train the contractor etc. on the parts that relate to the presentation tier and the API for the engine without explaining how the engine works (which should be irrelevant to the presentation components).
give the info to qualified consultants/outsourcers (send it to me, for example) and consider the ROI based on their estimates
it definitely sounds like you don't have the ability to do this efficiently in-house, but that doesn't mean that it is a bad idea - it depends on the ROI
for example, if your boss thinks this thing could generate $1M in revenue in the first year and a contractor could do the conversion in 6 months for $250K, the ROI (300% in 18 months) is probably good enough to do it
if the numbers are reversed, then it is obviously a Bad Idea ;-)
This sounds like a job for COCOMO II. COCOMO has been used successfully to estimate size and cost and staff size but it could be a pain. It requires a lot of details and time. But it does answer the question of how to go about estimating the size of the project and the number of people required and the time it will take.
The only way to properly estimate this is to give it to someone who 1. will be working on it; and 2. understands the language it's in as well as the language you are converting to.
Regardless, it is ALWAYS a BAD IDEA to bid on projects for which you have no experience. Every single time I've seen someone do that they badly underbid it. Not just in terms of the amount of work required, but also in the learning curve necessary to even begin to understand the underlying processes.
Especially beware of bidding a project you have no experience for then explicitly telling a subcontractor what their budget is to get a project done. I would never work under those conditions, again, because 100% of the time the person doing the bidding is going to get it way wrong.
One more thing, if it's a desktop app, with a backend, then it's already client server... Are you meaning to take an existing client/server app and convert it to a web app?

What steps make up your web development process and how much time does each phase take?

Let's say you work 100 days on a project. How many days would each phase of your process (requirements analysis, specification, etc.) take?
I'm interested also in the ratio of specific activities in every phase, such as writing tests, back-end coding, front-end coding, visual design, database design etc.
Many thanks!
EDIT:
Just to make things clear, I'm not talking about web site design - I'm interested in more "serious" web development, such as custom business web applications. I know, everything depends on the specifics of each project, however I suppose the ratios could be roughly the same from project to project.
EDIT2:
As Helen correctly remarked, this question is really hard to answer, since projects can be so different and so can be teams. To make it more specific, let's say you have a team of four developers - two of them for back-end work, one for front-end programming and one for design & html/css coding (one member of the team acts as a project manager) and you are supposed to develop StackOverflow.com site.
We're running agile scrum projects, so we typically run all these activities in parallel. So while I cannot answer your exact question, I can give you some ideas of the ratios we have found to be effective:
4-5 developers can be served by one client side programmer (html/css), one on-team tester and one interaction designer (works with the customer to design wireframes). A team like this typically needs a 50% graphic designer for most applications, but your mileage may vary there. Then there's project manager, and there's all sorts of other stakeholders that are not part of the core development team.
In the development team you normally have a couple of developers who are sharp on client side development and similar amount on the back-end. These staffings also tend to reflect resource usage ;) Testing is an integral part of development as well as the efforts of the on-team tester.
Your local conditions may of course vary, but these numbers are just to give you some idea.
Step 1: denial
Step 2: anger
Step 3: acceptence
The time each step takes is different for all team members involved.
I agree with everyone who started along the lines of, "It depends on the project".
On the other hand, I do think that there's a consistent process that can be followed; only tweaking the percentages of effort to match the project:
Typically, I follow these basic principles:
Discovery - determine the feature/functionality of the system. The easiest (and worst) thing to do is accept what's being asked for and go with it.
For example, "building stackoverflow.com" is a pretty broad request - and is actually the wrong request. The project has to start with "I need an online location where programmers can collaborate".
Based on that one thing you're trying to solve, you can drill down into all the details you want - like how a question will be answered, asked, rated, etc.
I think this is the most crucial step! output = requirements/specification; 20/100 days can safely be spent here
Wireframing - this is where I like to use basic HTML pages, paint.NET, or even construction paper and glue to mock up every aspect of the final site's functionality. I like using paper because it's easy to make changes :)
Going through this process forces you to consider just about every aspect of the user experience and gives you the flexibility to add/remove features and adjust your requirements as needed. Your customer has some input to changes before you've committed a bunch of time to writing code.
An added bonus is that you get to use paste :)
10/100 days
Implementation/Testing - I group implementation AND testing together because I think it's short sighted to develop a whole site without testing along the way. (At the same time, you still need step 4). This is the part where the rubber hits the road. If you've handled your client properly in steps 1 and 2, you'll be pleasantly writing your code without any last-minute changes in scope (or at least very few). I try to follow a general set of steps for implementation:
data develpment (db design, query design, sample data setup)
site framework (set up your environment(s); production, dev, and qa)
front-end structure (css, standard classes, standard html structures)
start coding!
55/100 days
SQA - hopefully you can get some non-involved parties/end users to test the app out as you go. Test plans need to be developed to ensure that it's clear what should be test and the desired outcomes. I like using real people for testing the front end; automated tools are fine for code/backend modules
This is a good time to let the client see things progressing - they should have very limited ability to make changes at this point.
10/100 days
Delivery/Post Production honeymoon - you've built it, tested it, and you're ready to deploy. Get the code out there and let the client play. You shouldn't have much to tweak; but I'm sure there will be some adjustments.
5/100 days
Some of this seems idealistic; but you'd be surprised how quickly you can ship your application when you've got a well-reviewed, well-created specification.
It is impossible to give a meaningful answer to this question. The ratios will not be even roughly the same from project to project. For some projects the visual design barely matters (as long as it more or less works) but the database is critical and complex. For others, it's all about providing a smooth user experience with lots of AJAX goodies and other eye candy, but the underlying data is trivially simple to organise and store.
It sounds like you're thinking mainly of one-man projects, but for larger teams the size and setup of the team also matters, as well as your development process.
Probably we are an unusual development shop. Our whole existence (at least during work hours) is requirements gathering. Developers are required to als work in every other department. Be it answering the phone in after sales support (and fighting the CRM Software), driving a forklift in the warehouse (and fighting the mobile terminals) or packing crates in the shipping station (and fighting confusing delivery notes).
When we tackle a new project "requirements gathering" was usually an afternoon on the whiteboard, usually with somebody from the department which used the new software most. There was little upfront design and lots of re-factoring and rewriting. We where very happy with this and generated about 100.000 Lines of Code which are well-architected and stable.
But it seems we are hitting a complexity barrier now. This is very frustrating because moving to "heavier" processes than hack and slay coding results in a dramatic loss of productivity.
Just to be clear - you're basically time-boxing your work - which is directly relational to having a fixed budget (4 developers x $x per day x 100 days - assuming it's 100 day duration and not 100 day work effort). If that's the case then, on avg. you would spend:
25% up front planning which includes scope, spec development, technology approach, logistics (computers, servers, work space), resource gathering.
50 % development - test case (TDD) development, schema design and implementation, front end coding, backend coding, deployment
15% Testing - basic break/fix activities
10% overhead/management - project management, communication and coordination.
Very rough est. - many 'areas' to consider including resource skills/maturity, technology being used, location of resources (one room or across the country), level of requirements, etc. The use of 'skill specific' resources would make planning more difficult since you might need the resources to perform multi-roles - one suggestion would be to get 3 generalists who can help spec/design/plan and one tech wizard that would ensure the platform and database are setup correctly (key to success once you have good as possible requirements)
That is truely a tricky questions. To give an somewhat exact estimation on the ratio of time you need to apply for each step - if we take a classical approach of design, implement, test and deploy - one needs to know the specification and the expertise of the project members.
If you take McConnell's book "Software Estimation" (which I highly recommend) you have a chapter in their about historical data and how to use that for future projects.
I do not think, that you have exact historical data of former projects - well - I don't have one - although I always remind me of recording them ;)
Since the smallest failures or uncertainties in the design-phase are the most crucial ones take a lot of time to specify what you want to do. Make sure that everyone understands it the same way and write it down.
To cut a long story short - I'd put 50% - 75% of the time in the design (if 75% this would include a prototype to clear all uncertainties) and equal parts in implementation and test.
If you are using TDD you would mix design and test a bit so you would take a bit of the design-phase and add it to the test-phase.
Building a list of client needs 1-2 days
This depends on the client and what they need and how well prepared they are.
Designers do initial sketch ups 2-3 days
A bit of branching happens here as 2 and 3 will happen concurrently.
Programers build any functionality not already in our existing system 1day - 1 month
This depends on the client, and what they need more then most anything else.
This also will only produce functional code.
Repeat steps 2&3 until the client is happy with the general feeling of what we have.
Could be 1 iteration could be 100 (not likely if by 10 we couldn't make them happy we'd send them somewhere else.
Build final design 1-5 days
This is the final, no error, valid CSS/HTML/JS, everything is cross browser ect
Build final functionality 2-3 days
This code is "perfect" it works 100%, it is pretty, there are no known bugs, and the developers are happy to send it
This and Step 5 happen concurrently.
Deploy 10 seconds.
Then 2weeks, 2 months and 6 months later we do a review to make sure there have been no problems.
So if you skip the review this usualy takes 8-20 days, IDK how you'll work that into 100 days.
If we are just building an application (or extending one) for a client we would spend 2-3 defining EXACTLY what they need then however long it takes to build it.

Resources