This session describes how Infotech has been able to establish and institutionalize the software project estimation practice as a process. Infotech captures the estimates, planned and actual data for Size, Effort & Schedule with the help of Metrics Tool which is developed in-house. The strategic advantages of the tool is its simplicity, user friendliness, negligible development cost thus making it easy for understanding, implementation without much training and applicability for all projects.

It is a well-known fact that, estimating a software project has been one of the difficult challenges in the software industry. Several tools have come into market, but none of the tools have become popular or accepted universally. No single unit for size has been adopted and making it difficult to quantify the productivity across various platforms used in software industry. Productivity definition is a major issue in industries offering various other IT services (maintenance, digitisation, engineering solutions etc.,) in addition to software development.

No estimation technique gives accurate results, however the estimations tend to converge with the actual as the project progresses towards completion. Hence it is essential to revisit the estimates periodically as part of project progress reviews at the end of various phases / deliverables. Estimations are always associated with uncertainties & risks. As risk is inversely proportional to knowledge, the more clear understanding of requirements in subsequent phases of project execution helps in reducing the risks of inaccurate estimations.

The software estimation process involves:

In a nut shell, software estimation process is to estimate the size of the software work products, effort & cost involved, the resources needed, produce a schedule, and negotiate commitments.

This session focuses on process to estimate / plan size, effort, and schedules for the projects. It defines various attributes required for the process and steps involved in base lining the values for the identified attributes. It also shares the guidance in using historical data from then Organization’s software process database to establish credible Estimates. The other aspects of estimations are as per the general software engineering practice. An effort is made to provide excel templates so that interested organisations can adopt the same with ease.

N.G.Raju is a graduate in Mechanical Engineering (1966-71) from Regional Engineering College, Warangal, and M.Tech., in Industrial engineering & Management from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (1976- 78) in School of Continuing Education. He has around 34 years of experience in various organizations like Shriram Refrigeration Industries Ltd., Directorate General of Quality Assurance – Ministry of Defense and Infotech enterprises Ltd., covering production, quality assurance and software development activities. At Infotech, he managed and led an ERP project spanning 3 years, involving large number of cross functional and integration issues. At present he is heading the CQG functions and responsible for defining & implementing processes. He steered the company for the successful assessment of SW-CMM level 4 in August 2001, SW-CMM level 5 in April 2002, and CMMI level 5 in April 2003, ISO 9001: 2000 in November 2001, BS7799 in Sept 2004 and AS 9001 in Dec2005. He has also leaded the project “CMM Metrics Tool”, complex management information system software, which will enable implementation of processes across the organization.