Software process and project management (third job)

What are the methods for estimating software workloads?

In software projects, the workload mainly includes the workload of software system research and development, project management workload, and the work of supporting class such as service. The main purpose of estimating the workload is to provide data support for pre-bid decisions (such as whether bids, outsourcing, internal subcontracting, etc.) and project budget formulation during the implementation phase.

Estimating process

We estimate the software system, project management, and support class work separately.

Total project workload = Software system workload + Project management workload + support class workload

Software system Workload estimation

Whether it is pre-bid or implementation phase, we will set up an informal planning team, by the Executive department head or PM as the coordinator, the team is composed of technical experts and industry experts within the organization. When estimating, we first perform the functional decomposition of the software system from top to bottom, and make the wbs,wbs of the software system, the underlying work package usually corresponds to the menu item of the software system, and then separate the work packages from requirements research and analysis, system design, coding and unit testing, system testing, System test rework and pre-acceptance rework and operation of the six stages of the evaluation, and finally use a bottom-up method to summarize the workload of each work package as the overall workload of the software system. The workload of the work package is estimated by man-day, 1 days = 8 hours; The overall workload is estimated by the person-month unit, and the 1-month =22 person.

In the implementation of the estimation process, through the expert judgment, Delphi method, in two stages of the estimation. In the first stage, the planning team members respectively to the software system function decomposition, by the Coordinator collects the decomposition result organizes the planning group to convene the review meeting, coordinates the various views, until the software system WBS decomposition agreed. In the second stage, the members of the planning team estimate the WBS of the software system separately, if the estimated deviation is less than 10%, then the average is calculated, otherwise it is recalculated until the deviation is within 10%.

At the time of estimation, the materials used for estimating, such as tender documents, estimate documents for past projects, project implementation documents, resources collected online, project constraints and assumptions, and discussion of deviations are fully shared within the planning team to ensure that the most accurate results are obtained by the planning team members in their independent estimates.

Project Management Workload Estimation

The workload of project management we set a management cost allocation factor based on the statistical data within the organization and the size of the project, typically ranging from 8% to 15% depending on the complexity of the project

Workload estimation for support class work

Support class work includes the project process documentation, project acceptance document preparation, customer training, system installation and deployment, according to the actual situation of the project and the experience of the previous project, by the planning team members to evaluate the average to obtain

Risk Reserve Estimate

Whether it is pre-bid or implementation phase, the estimated project information may be incomplete, in order to estimate the relative accuracy of the risk reserve and do not add excessive management costs, we generally only a preliminary identification of requirements and technology risks, based on previous project experience, first assess the project's worst case, The cap on the risk reserve for a project is then estimated by the planning team members separately and then averaged to obtain the project's risk reserve benchmark.

The risk reserve is not part of the project budget and is subject to the approval of the Quality Control department, the project director and the general manager of the business unit for the use of the risk reserve.

Workload estimation Tracking

The workload estimation tracks the actual workload of each work in the process of collecting the project, compares the actual value and the estimate value, obtains the deviation of the two, deviations analysis and causality analysis, and finds out the reasons for the inconsistency between the actual and the estimate, such as the range changes frequently, the scope spreads, the project schedule is unreasonable, the quality is low, Team performance is low, the team members flow frequently, the team internal communication is insufficient, etc., the purpose is to provide the reference data for the subsequent forecast analysis of the project and accumulate the actual base data for the future project workload estimation.

Related workload statistics, deviation analysis, causal analysis and other documents as configuration items, integrated into the configuration management system for unified management.

In general, for comparison purposes, the actual workload statistics use a template that is consistent with the workload estimates, which are collected and filled out weekly by the project manager.

Software process and project management (third job)