If you were unable to attend "Building an Estimation Center of Excellence," the webinar replay and slides are now available. Here are the Q&A highlights:

How do you handle estimating change requests (scope creep). Do you estimate the entire project again, or do you just estimate the impact of the change requests?

It would depend on where we were in the project lifecycle. If we were still fairly early on (somewhere between the feasibility assessment and the refined estimate), I would add those into my sizing assumptions and re-estimate the project. If I'm already farther along and I get changes when I'm already constructing the system, then I would use my adaptive forecasting and add those in within the context of everything else I have to build as part of the deliverable release. This is because the impact will be bigger if we're farther along and we already have everything integrated and we're into testing versus earlier on when not a lot has been constructed. QSM's forecasting capabilities will be able to tell us the impact on schedule and cost.

Should the center of excellence estimate all projects regardless of size, or if the project is small, then have the project teams estimate it?

The latest version of QSM’s Performance Benchmark Table is live!

QSM is excited to announce the release of their latest version of the Performance Benchmark Table.  Last updated in 2009, the table provides a high-level reference for benchmarking and estimating IT, Engineering, and Real Time Systems.  It displays industry average duration, effort, staff, and SLOC (or FP) per Person Month for the full range of project sizes encompassed by each trend group. 

The results were analyzed from a database of 1,115 high or moderate confidence projects completed between 2008 and 2012.  Sixteen countries and 52 different languages were represented in this sample.  In addition to the industry average, minimum and maximum values were also provided for each metric to help give a range of possible results.

The project sizes differed somewhat from the previous version to accommodate the new range of sizes present in the data.  Rather than using the same project sizes across trend groups, we selected project sizes specific to each trend.  Since Business projects are typically smaller than Engineering or Real Time projects, this allows readers to select a size relevant to the type of project they’re estimating or benchmarking.  

This tool can be particularly useful to developers and/ or project managers who are new to estimation or do not have historical project data.  

On Thursday, June 13, at 1:00 PM EDT, Larry Putnam, Jr. will present Building an Estimation Center of Excellence.

The pressure to succeed in software development is higher than ever - the current economic climate demands we do more with less, there is fierce global and domestic competition, time-to-market expectations are high, and your company's reputation is on the line. When projects fail, the failure to meet expectations is more often an estimation or business decision failure than a production or execution issue. In this webinar, industry expert Larry Putnam, Jr. takes you through the key elements and step-by-step process for setting up an estimation center of excellence that will ensure your projects succeed.

Larry Putnam, Jr. has 25 years of experience using the Putnam-SLIM Methodology. He has participated in hundreds of estimation and oversight service engagements, and is responsible for product management of the SLIM Suite of software measurement tools and customer care programs. Since becoming Co-CEO, Larry has built QSM's capabilities in sales, customer support, product requirements and most recently in creating a world class consulting organization. Larry has delivered numerous speeches at conferences on software estimation and measurement, and has trained - over a five-year period - more than 1,000 software professionals on industry best practice measurement, estimation and control techniques and in the use of the SLIM Suite.

Watch the replay!

Having worked in sales and customer service at QSM for over 17 years, I speak to hundreds of professionals each year that are directly or indirectly involved with software development projects using many different development processes. One of the things that I hear from time to time is that estimating is not as important when working with more iterative development methodologies. Some of the reasons I hear most often are that “team sizes are smaller,” “work can be deferred until the next iteration,” “we are different,” and “we are agile.”

As I dig deeper though, I find that the fundamental questions that software estimates answer are relevant, no matter what development methodology is being used. Before committing to a project, executives and managers need to determine reasonable cost, schedule, and how much they can deliver. This is when not very much is known and before any detailed planning occurs.  Estimating helps mitigate risk early in the project lifecycle. Companies also need to have reliable information in order to negotiate with clients. How can we negotiate a schedule and a budget on any project without a defensible estimate? 

When looking at QSM research based on our database of over 10,000 industry projects, a common theme that we see in failed projects is that development team performance is often not the issue. When it comes to missed schedules and budgets, many of the problems occur when expectations are too high and when estimates are not a priority. If we don’t have a reliable estimate up front before the project starts, it’s tough to plan ahead. 

I discovered early on that the player who learned the fundamentals of basketball is going to have a much better chance of succeeding and rising through the levels of competition than the player who was content to do things his own way. A player should be interested in learning why things are done a certain way. The reasons behind the teaching often go a long way to helping develop the skill. — John Wooden

John Wooden is regarded as one of the greatest college basketball coaches. He believed that after talent, courage, and character, fundamentals built successful teams. Successful software projects result from knowing and practicing fundamentals as well, and it begins with estimation.

I thought it would be fun to see if Coach Wooden, by way of noted quotes, could help simplify a few SLIM core concepts.

A recent series of posts by Karl Wiegers eloquently discusses the "reality of tradeoffs" software professionals deal with every day, going beyond the typical success drivers (time, cost, and quality) to include product features and staff. He shares inspiring practical information by making distinctions between constraints, drivers, and degrees of freedom, each representing the amount of flexibility the project manager has to adjust a key factor.

SLIM-Estimate has modeled the non-linear interdependencies of these metrics for over thirty years. It accounts for Wiegers’s five project success factors explicitly, showing the tradeoffs between them in real time. I have mapped Wiegers’s Five Dimensions to SLIM-Estimate’s parameters to show how you can use SLIM-Estimate quantify the trade-offs Wiegers describes.