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Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment
book

Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment

by Steve Tockey
August 2004
Intermediate to advanced
656 pages
15h 28m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment

Estimates and Uncertainty

In some situations, the factor being estimated may have a broad range of possible outcomes, and other situations may have a much narrower range. Eleven months into a 12-month software project you should have a much better idea of the finish date than you did at project start. The size of that range is sometimes called variance or uncertainty (see Appendix E). The more uncertainty in the factor, the less likely you are to hit the actual outcome with your estimate. Figure 21.2 shows examples of probability distributions with different uncertainties compared to Figure 21.1.

Figure 21.2. Two probability distributions, one with high uncertainty and another with low uncertainty

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0321228758Purchase book