Software Estimation Without Guessing: Effective Planning in an Imperfect World

Description

From the Introduction Goal of This Book The goal of this book is not to make you an expert at estimation. Estimation is a tool rather than a goal in itself. Maintain focus on the real goals: the outputs, the outcomes, and the impact of the system you’re building. Estimation is a tool for achieving these goals more reliably in an uncertain, error-prone world. Estimation lets you see into the future and make decisions about the path you’re on, before you reach the endpoint. We’ll also take note of some other ways that estimation can help us, as an organization working together, achieve common goals and fulfill the responsibilities of our various roles. Who This Book Is For You may find this book useful no matter what your role in software development. In fact, you might apply these ideas outside of software development, though I haven’t specifically addressed that. When writing this book, I’ve had three broad classes of people involved with software development in mind. They are as follows: Software Team Members These are the people who often get asked for estimates they don’t care about. These are the people who often get blamed when results aren’t the same as the estimates. Upper Management These are the people who have business decisions to make and who need forward-looking data to make them. These are the people who aren’t close enough to the development work that’s going on to directly know how well things are going. Software Estimation, planning Middle Management These are the people caught in the middle of the other two groups and catch it from both sides. These are the people with a responsibility to meet the expectations of upper management and keep those expectations reasonable. These are the people with a responsibility to intervene when necessary to help the development effort go well. All of these people might gain an understanding of some new ways to estimate. They can learn to avoid some of the common pitfalls of relying on estimates with insufficient awareness of their limitations. They can gain some perspective of what needs require what sort of estimates. All of them might benefit from stepping back to a larger view of the topic, and especially by considering the view from a variety of points of view.