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GEM-UP CONSULTING |
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Take the higher ground® |
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Services Software Eng.: Software valuation, cost estimation |
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When a project goes over-budget or past its deadline, it seems that managers often search solutions within the operational capability domain of classic software engineering themes: Is the team capability questionable, is the development process faulty, are the tools inefficient? Yet very rarely would managers question the cost estimation process; is it possible after all that the development team, processes and tools are mature. Was the project was doomed from the beginning simply because the cost estimation practices of the organization are weak? To answer this question, managers should run a sanity check on the overall productivity of the team, carefully assessing the actual size and complexity of the software, all the project attributes and revising the expected effort associated to the project. If the result demonstrates that the project execution was sane then a process improvement effort associated to the software estimation practices is required. |
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Estimating your software assets and costing critical projects. |
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Improving the cost estimation process allows organizations to improve their quality, resource allocation, communication to stakeholders and employee retention. The CMMI® identifies cost estimation as a subpractice of the project planning process area with a particular focus on the historical data technique. Practitioners have developed other estimation techniques that prove efficient for most settings – keeping projects within schedule and cost.
GEM-UP offers facilitation services that helps organization implement a solid cost estimation process. Also we offer valuation services to assess the value of already developed software. |
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Cost Estimation process implementation |
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Step 1: Set the goals, what is an acceptable accuracy? Step 2: Set awareness, what are the benefits of proper cost estimation? Step 3: Start to measure and collect data, you’ll need to know how you are progressing. Step 4: Select new estimation techniques, the ones appropriate to your context. Step 5: Train the team, pilot, learn. Step 6: Go back to step 4 until your goals are reached; if they are, you have won the battle. |
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CMMI and IDEAL are Trademarks of Carnegie Mellon University |