Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment

Summary

This chapter described the four general families of estimation techniques:

• Expert judgment estimation involves having someone—with some level of trust and credibility—give his or her best assessment.

• Estimation by analogy creates an estimate for a new situation by using the actual outcome for one or more known, past situations together with an accounting of the differences.

• Bottom-up estimation divides the thing being estimated into smaller parts and builds up the estimate of that whole from the sum of the estimates of the parts. This technique is based on the law of large numbers; inaccuracies in the bottom-level estimates will tend to cancel each other out and give a more accurate estimate than a single estimate of the whole.

• Statistical ...