Estimating the development effort for web applications has always been a challenging task and continues to remain so. Web applications involve new and multiple technologies and established estimation methodologies such as Function Points are often inadequate to estimate the effort for such complex applications. Absence of established methodologies does not mean that there is no systematic way of estimating these complex applications. Over the last five years, the plain expert estimation has evolved or matured to such an extent that it has evolved into many semi-structured methodologies.
This presentation describes this evolution and presents the details of few such methodologies. The presentation illustrates one such methodology called MVC Points in detail.

Nagaraja Gundappa is General Manager, Head, Execution Excellence group. He has 14+ years of Industry experience of which nearly 10 years is at Wipro Technologies, has also worked with National Aerospace Laboratories and Tata Unisys (Now Tata Infotech). He is an M.Tech., Computer Science and Engineering and B.E. in Electrical Engineering.

Nagaraja has managed a project that won “Best application utilizing reusable components” in Object World West 97, an event sponsored by OMG; won Group president’s award for best project, 1998 in Wipro Technoliges; and also won the best paper award in TechForum 1998, a Wipro Technologies wide conference.

Some of his publications/presentations include: