Getting Results from Software Development Teams

Chapter 7. Estimating Project Size, Cost, and Schedule

A cynic is one who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

— Oscar Wilde

Determining how long a software development effort will take and cost is a multistep process. It involves estimating the magnitude of the effort, establishing a schedule, and then computing the cost of the project using labor and other costs appropriate to your firm. This process is repeated almost continuously throughout the project’s lifecycle as the requirements and other factors change.

In this chapter, I examine and demonstrate methods for estimating the magnitude of the effort in terms of number of lines of code. We look at system size initially because the sizing and estimating methods for software ...