International Software Estimation Colloquium

Daniel D. Galorath
President and Founder,
Galorath Incorporated

"I invite you to the 1st International Software Estimation Colloquium brought to you by QAI. The aim of this forum is to provide opportunities for organizations and individuals to share the pragmatic techniques that work.

Software projects fail more due to lack of planning than any other reason. Risk and uncertainty are often ignored, or worse, denied. And even if a project plan has been created, it is often ignored when development begins in earnest. Repeatable and reliable project estimation, planning and control, and measurement and analysis are in every software best practice list. Yet, after so many years, we have no clear answer on how exactly practical can estimation be, and how we can help institutionalize estimation. The puzzle is solved, but a lot remains to be solved.

Collecting simple productivity data is a step in the right direction, but in itself, is insufficient to ensure achievable plans unless the productivity data is adjusted for risk factors. The message is that with careful and consistent use of estimation, planning and control models and processes, software projects can be brought in on-time and within budget. This is the very premise for conceptualizing this event.

Wish all of you a great learning at the event."

Robert L. Galen
Principal Consultant,
RGalen Consulting Group, L.L.C.

" In my consulting and teaching I get exposed to a wider variety of software development and testing professionals. As a group, they consistently face several key common challenges. One of the top 3 challenges is providing defensible and accurate estimates for their projects and they continuously struggle in sorting out—how big, how much and how long.

Most don’t have the tools, techniques, or experience to estimate well. There is also what I’ll call a practitioners gap in the current estimation state of the art. The literature and tools are unwieldy, skewed towards very large projects and the techniques are unwieldy. Rarely do you find real-world, practical guidance that is applicable to your domain and actually useful.

My vision for SEC 2006 is that it begins the process of sharing pragmatic techniques, from a wide variety of true practitioner perspectives. Poor estimation leads towards failed projects and all that it encompasses. As a discipline, we need to work hard to improve these capabilities. SEC 2006 will begin to build up a repository of real-world experience, shared lessons & techniques and historical data that can be used by all to improve our estimation capabilities."