Code Complete, 2nd Edition

Estimating a Construction Schedule

Managing a software project is one of the formidable challenges of the twenty-first century, and estimating the size of a project and the effort required to complete it is one of the most challenging aspects of software-project management. The average large software project is one year late and 100 percent over budget (Standish Group 1994, Jones 1997, Johnson 1999). At the individual level, surveys of estimated vs. actual schedules have found that developers' estimates tend to have an optimism factor of 20 to 30 percent (van Genuchten 1991).This has as much to do with poor size and effort estimates as with poor ...