Articles for category: Delivery

November 3, 2015

Greg Thomas

Factors of Software Estimation – Slush

The last and final piece of any software estimation is knowing what you don’t know. Let’s review… Experience gives you the background to know what type of problem you are trying to solve, what should I be asking, what pieces of history and context do I bring to this estimate. Knowledge is the frame on what do I know about this domain, is this my area of expertise and what do I have that I can leverage to fix this problem. Understanding the Problem is about avoiding the trap of glazing over the problem and not getting a proper description

November 1, 2015

Greg Thomas

Embrace Your Grunt Work

In any job there are those tasks that just need to get done and they are not the most challenging of jobs either.  And there is no way around it.  This is the Grunt work and for everyone it is different, it could be fixing bugs, estimating your tasks, doing a code review, etc, etc, etc. But it has to get done, it is part of our jobs.  Every job has it’s own set of grunt work as well – do you think Doctors like filling out prescriptions (maybe who knows) or at some point an athlete will get bored

October 29, 2015

Greg Thomas

Factors of Software Estimation – Your Knowledge

We are at the half-way point in this series and I thought I’d try to fit in this post while I wait for my 9GB of Halo 5 updates to be downloaded to my XBOX. Experience and Understanding the Problem are two of the four pieces to being good at estimating what you are trying to do.  The third?  Knowledge. You might say – “Well isn’t experience knowledge?” – no it’s not, experience is the act of gaining knowledge through doing estimation.  But knowledge can be garnered without experience, i.e., I can pick up a book and read all about

October 27, 2015

Greg Thomas

Factors of Software Estimation – Understand the Problem

Continuing on our this very recent series of Software Estimation where we first talked about Experience, now we are going to turn our attention towards the answer everyone says when their estimation is off the mark; I didn’t understand the problem How simple is that, understand what you are building?  When you think of a house being built, how much effort goes into the ground before a drop of concrete is poured?  Soil samples, digging – groundwork – this is what is laid when you are able to understand the problem.  Are the doors being installed when the floors have yet

October 25, 2015

Greg Thomas

Factors of Software Estimation – Experience

Ask anyone in any field how long it takes to accomplish a task and you would hopefully get something of a straight-forward response in a decent amount of time. Ask a Software Developer how long it takes to code X and you’ll probably be graced with a number of questions that could include, but not be limited to; Have I ever worked on this component? What language am I using? Do I know this language? Is this a hard problem? Do I know the platform? Do we have requirements? Is this a high-priority? When does it need to be done? And the

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