As we received a new development order from BPO company for their workflow automation, suggest me a good time estimation method to arrive the deadline for the project, we have done macro level requirement gathering, we need to submit the project plan(time estimation) based on requirements before going in deep to designing proto type or design documents. Saving Changes...
The best way to go about it, in my opinion, is to take the workflow that was created and use that as a reference to calculate your function points (FP). Once you have a handle to the number of FPs, you can calculate the expected SLOC for the project based on the choice of the development technology. For example 1 FP to develop in C++ generally corresponds to 54-56 lines of codes. Once you have this estimate, you can take the industry standard for per FP productivity and get a rough estimate for your project.
You can visit the following URL to know more about FP. I believe FP is the most used statistical tool to estimate software development projects these days.
hi Jayant, You exactly addressed the topic which am having lot of doubts, let me give you some overview on our requirements and development tools, we would be using PHP &MySql to develop this web based work flow automation system, will FP applicable to Web based developments? if so, how to calcuate the SLOC? because we are using GUI tools to develop application, in this case most of the GUI related & some validation codes automatically generated by these tools, secondly as I mentioned in my previous post, we are having macro level info related to application, in FP, without knowing EI,EO,ILF,EIF and DET's its not possible to arrive the FP count, these informations could be arrived only after designing atleast prototype screens & ERD, isn't it? in this case how to estimate the effort without having prototype & ERD? if am wrong on the concept pl. highlight me where am misunderstood. Saving Changes...
Frank WintersPhotographer and ConservationistSandwich, Ma, United States
Hi Srini,
As you know there are lot's of articles on gh re: estimating. Search on "estimating" and you'll get a lot of hits.
There are lots of others including some that focus on function Point analysis. Unfortunately this is a deep topic so no ready, simple answer to your question can be made. But if you can spend a little time reading you should find what you are looking for.
Srini, my apologies on getting back late on this. I understand the fix you are in. While using FP where nothing is available to base your calculation is a challenge. There is another FP calculation methodology called "FP Mark II" that can be used for esitmations where prototype is not available. This methodology is extensively used while generating proposals where sufficient data or prototype is not available. In this case usually BRD/like documents are taken to generate base estimates. I am forwarding couple of URL that you may find useful. You can use this to further explore Mark II. Hope this helps.
