Problems with an impatient boss and insane deadlines — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

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Problems with an impatient boss and insane deadlines

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Dan, An estimate report is a very good idea. I often use them to estimate the time a project will take. I would add two things to what you have said: 1) Each step in the project needs to be divided into the smallest steps possible. The larger the step, the more you are guessing about your time. For example, if a step in the project is "copy an xml file to the database". Divide this up into as many steps as possible, starting with 1. Read the xml file. 2 Parse the xml statements 3. store in the database. Now break each of these into their component parts until you are at the point of (eg.) "use a library call to read a line of text", or "read a character from the open port" Once you have reached this level of granularity in your analysis of the project, you can start assigning times to each task. This is the where my second point comes in: "No task takes less than half a day to complete." This second point may seem a bit of an over estimate. You may look at a task and say to your self "I can write the function to read a character from the port in fifteen minutes." But, this doesn't allow any time for errors, testing, or unforeseen events. Also if it really only does take fifteen minutes to write that function, you have surely underestimated the length of time to write some other function so the extra time will be used up there. I always take another step after coming up with the estimates for each process in the project: I will usually take the total time (for example Dan's 106 hours) add 10% and then double the time. This means that the above mentioned project will probably actually take about 230 hours to complete. Again, this seems as if I'm being very liberal with the time, but I've been estimating projects for over twenty years and have many times received comments on how accurate my estimates are. Of course, that may just be because, having done this for so long, I have a good feel for how long each project should take. There was a fortune cookie on usb-4.2 that said "To make an accurate estimate of how long a project will take, make your best guess for the length of the project, add 10% and double the result. Then convert to the next higher units of measure." This means that Dan's estimate should be 230 days to complete the project. . -- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful. [url=http://www.hyperbole-software.com/] [img]http://www.hyperbole-software.com/ozone/hyperbole-88x33.gif[/img] [/url] Loading...
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