software project estimation – is it an art …

there are many methods to estimate a software project. All of them contain sufficiently large literature and complex formulaes .If one has to refer  it quickly it cannot be done and even if that is done one will never get so much data as to predict it accurately and in the manner they are saying. so will it always be art.

and here is a link which explains estimating a project using “use cases”. Use cases in any form are the starting point for any project discussions. So it can also be used for creating estimates. Thought this assumes that the use cases are very detailed and lot of thought should go into many other factors as well. Every project is different which may or may not have so much data but the point is in being aware of the fact that use case alongwith few factors can help in estimating effort for a project. And the actual data can be arrived using whatever information is available for a project.

ps – i am using presentation from slideshare in this post. They have just released mobile version of slideshare. Read it here. And it looks like this product was developed during Yahoo Open hack day in bangalore. Read it here.

this month – scott myers..

This month has been good in terms of peoples I have listened to.

Robert Sedgewick at Adobe, bangalore on Finding paths in graphs. A computer science professor at princeton university, he has written several books on algorithms and is also on the board of director of Adobe.

Scott myers at Dr Dobbs SD Best Practices 2007. Familiar name for any body who know c++. Author of Effective c++ series. His topic was better software – no matter what. There was nothing new but just listening to him was an experience. Takeaways were , name everything well. Make it hard to make mistakes for others using naming conventions. Utilizing c/c++ type checkings at compile time as compared to runtime overheads. Do static analysis and code reviews instead of relying totally on QA efforts.

Herbert thompson at Dr Dobbs SD Best Practices 2007. He is the author of several books on how to break software security. Did not know him earlier but the talk on security was good. Got insight into how softwares can be broken by people of other types. He showed bugs in notepad and our own Adobe Macromedia Flash.  For the first time I understood and saw live demonstration using macromedia flash player 6 – buffer overflow vulnerability and how it can cause malicious code to execute – it was interesting.