The Blog of Matt Peters

In my career, I have worked for and observed a wide range of managers. Some are great, some are less so. But, as I’ve made the progression into management over the last couple years, I have thought a lot about what makes a good manager in IT. Perhaps these apply to other fields, but IT [...]

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In the previous posts I have discussed the process of software development so that we can get a good handle on what we are estimating.  I have discussed the cone of uncertainty so we can know how accurate our estimates should be.  And I have talked about four different estimation techniques: Expert Judgement, Count, Function [...]

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Decomposition is the estimation technique most software developers are familiar with.  Using this technique, you break the entire project into the individual components that are going to be impacted.  Within each component, you itemize the changes that have be be made.  You then estimate how long each of those changes will take to complete.  Add [...]

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This post is part of my series on Software Project Estimation: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Process of Software Development Part 3: The Cone of Uncertainty Part 4: Expert Judgement Part 5: Count Part 6: Function Point Analysis Part 7: Story Points Story Point Estimation is the most popular form of estimation on projects [...]

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This post is part of my series on Software Project Estimation: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Process of Software Development Part 3: The Cone of Uncertainty Part 4: Expert Judgement Part 5: Count Part 6: Function Point Analysis Function Point Analysis is one of the estimation techniques I have been most excited about over [...]

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This post is part of my series on Software Project Estimation:  Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Process of Software Development Part 3: The Cone of Uncertainty Part 4: Expert Judgement Part 5: Count Today’s I’d like to dive into another software estimation methodology.  I’ll refer to this only simply as Counting.  Using this technique [...]

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This post is part of my series on Software Project Estimation: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Process of Software Development Part 3: The Cone of Uncertainty Part 4: Expert Judgement Part 5: Count Expert Judgement is the first estimation technique I’m going to explore. Normally when a team is trying to come up with [...]

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This post is part of my series on Software Project Estimation: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Process of Software Development Part 3: The Cone of Uncertainty Part 4: Expert Judgement Part 5: Count The Cone of Uncertainty is another point that is very important to understand when trying to come up with an estimate [...]

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This post is part of my series on Software Project Estimation:  Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Process of Software Development Part 3: The Cone of Uncertainty Part 4: Expert Judgement Part 5: Count To come up with an estimate for completing a software development project, first you need to really understand the process of [...]

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This post is part of my series on Software Project Estimation: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Process of Software Development Part 3: The Cone of Uncertainty Part 4: Expert Judgement Part 5: Count One of the biggest challenges I have run into in the course of my career is coming up with good estimates [...]

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