Software Project Estimation for Test Professionals (Elective)

This course covers the Elective area of the Certified Test Manager (CTM) certification, Certified Software Test Professional certification and the CSTAS certification.

For costs and cities where this course might be offered, please see the right border of this page or to bring this course to your test team at your location, contact our Education and Professionals Services Group.

Concepts

This course focuses on basic software project estimating skills that can be used across mainstream as well as agile software projects. Project estimation is one of the most difficult challenges facing software development and testing teams and we often don't have the requisite skills to properly size, scope and plan our projects. Plus, the business always expects miracles in execution time. Here we'll explore proven strategies to estimate and communicate effectively.

We'll also explore the agile methodologies from an estimation perspective. Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Crystal and the like have re-discovered that collaborative, card based planning can be simple, effective and powerful. It's also a planning paradigm shift of sorts, from “big bang” plans, to more of a time boxed, iterative and guiding model.

While targeted toward the software test leader or manager, this workshop will provide valuable techniques and insights to virtually anyone tasked with estimating software project construction and testing. It will provide an in-depth survey to a wide variety of estimating techniques including -

• Survey of various Sizing & Counting techniques - KLOC, Function Points, Story Points , Use Case Points, and COCOMO
• Explore two approaches to Team Collaborative Estimation (Wideband Delphi and Dwayne Phillips' - RAD oriented sticky note planning)
• Share Insights from the from the Agile Community and from mainstream software development projects (Extreme Programming and SCRUM will be examined)
• Focus on Estimate Processing and Effective Communications to teams and stakeholders

Outline

• Introduction
• What to estimate (Scope Sizing)
  • PROBE method, from Watts Humphrey and PSP
  • Function Points, from IFPUG
  • Story Points , from Agile/XP
  • Use Case Points
  • COCOMO II
  • By analogy, expert judgment, by decomposition and gut feel
• How to Estimate (Collaborative Workshops)
  • Level of effort
  • Effectively estimating calendar time
  • Estimating & planning lessons from XP
  • Domain experts or Subject Matter Experts (SME) effort
  • From XP/Stories – “Archetypal” Engineer
  • Wideband Delphi – Barry Boehm
    • Small scope (~ 50 tasks) collaborative, team based brainstorming for tasks, effort, sequencing / scheduling and resource assignment
    • By-products include artifacts for risks and assumptions
    • Using "area experts" for each estimating exercise
  • “Sticky Note” Planning / Cards-on-a-Wall (CoaW) - Dwayne Phillips
  • An effective brainstorming technique for larger scale and more intensive planning sessions
  • A logical "extension" to Wideband Delphi – JAD planning
  • Also examines task sequencing, assumptions, risks and other project dependencies
• Communicating Estimates (Stakeholder Management)
  • Formats within the team
  • Explaining the estimate to senior management
  • Defending the estimate and managing expectations
  • Project and estimate “resets”
  • Last step – the WBS (Tasks, Duration, Sequencing) and Schedule(Work Assignments, Interdependencies) – leading to the planning & scheduling workshop
• Wrap-up & Debrief