Software Engineering (ESC501)

- Project Planning & Project

Estimation Techniques
- Prof. Poulami Dutta
 Intended Learning Outcomes
(ILOs)
Identify the job responsibilities of a software project manager.

Identify the necessary skills required in order to perform software project

management.

Identify the essential activities of project planning.

Determine the different project related estimates performed by a project

manager and suitably order those estimates.

Explain what is meant by Sliding Window Planning.

Explain what is Software Project Management Plan (SPMP).

Identify and explain two metrics for software project size estimation.

Identify the shortcomings of function point (FP) metric.

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 Organization of this
Lecture
Introduction to Project Planning

Software Cost Estimation

Cost Estimation Models

Software Size Metrics

Empirical Estimation

Heuristic Estimation

COCOMO

Staffing Level Estimation

Effect of Schedule Compression on Cost

Summary

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 Introduction
Many software projects fail:

due to faulty project management practices:

It is important to learn different aspects of software project

management.

Goal of software project management:

enable a group of engineers to work efficiently towards

successful completion of a software project.

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 Responsibility of Project
Managers
take the overall responsibility of steering a project to success.
difficult to objectively describe the job responsibilities of a project manager.
ranges from invisible activities like building up team morale to highly visible
customer presentations.
activities can be broadly classified into
project planning - project planning activity is undertaken before the
development starts to plan the activities to be undertaken during
development.
project monitoring and
control activities – undertaken once the development activities start with
the aim of ensuring that the development proceeds as per plan and
changing the plan whenever required to cope up with the situation.
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 Responsibility of Project
Managers (Contd.)
Project proposal writing,
Project cost estimation,
Scheduling,
Project staffing,
Project monitoring and control,
Software configuration management,
Risk management,
Managerial report writing and presentations, etc.

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Skills for Software Project Management
theoretical knowledge,
good qualitative judgment and decision making capabilities,
good grasp of the latest software project management techniques such
as cost estimation, risk management, configuration management,
good communication skills and the ability to get work done,
skills such as tracking and controlling the progress of the project,
customer interaction, managerial presentations, and team building are
largely acquired through experience.

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 Project Planning Activities
Estimation:

Project size: What will be problem complexity in terms of the effort and time required to
develop the product?
Cost: How much is it going to cost to develop the project?
Duration: How long is it going to take to complete development?
Effort: How much effort would be required?

Project scheduling of man power and other resources.

Staff organization:

staffing plans

Risk handling:

identification, analysis, and abatement procedures.

Miscellaneous plans: quality assurance plan, configuration management plan, etc.

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 Precedence of Project Planning
Activities

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 Sliding Window Planning
Requires utmost care and attention since commitment to unrealistic time and resource estimates result in
schedule slippage.

Delays can cause customer dissatisfaction and adversely affect team morale. It can even cause project
failure.

For large projects, it is very much difficult to make accurate plans. A part of this difficulty is due to the fact
that the proper parameters, scope of the project, project staff, etc. may change during the span of the
project.

To overcome this problem, sometimes project managers undertake project planning in stages.

Protects from making commitments too early.

Technique of staggered planning is known as Sliding Window Planning

Starts with an initial plan,

Project is planned accurately in the successive stages,

After the completion of every phase, the project managers can plan each subsequent phase more
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accurately and with increasing levels of confidence. 10

s
SPMP (Software Project Management
Plan)
After planning is complete:
Document the plans:
in a Software Project Management Plan(SPMP) document.
List of different items.
SPMP

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 Organization of SPMP Document
Introduction (Objectives, Major Functions, Performance Issues, Management and Technical
Constraints)
Project Estimates (Historical Data, Estimation Techniques, Effort, Cost, and Project Duration
Estimates)
Project Resources Plan (People, Hardware and Software, Special Resources)
Schedules (Work Breakdown Structure, Task Network, Gantt Chart Representation, PERT
Chart Representation)
Staff Organization (Team Structure, Management Reporting)
Risk Management Plan (Risk Analysis, Risk Identification, Risk Estimation, Abatement
Procedures)
Project Tracking and Control Plan
Miscellaneous Plans (Process Tailoring, Quality Assurance)

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 Metrics For Software Project Size
Estimation
size of a problem is obviously not the number of bytes that the source code occupies

neither is it the byte size of the executable code

project size is a measure of the problem complexity in terms of the effort and time required to develop
the product

Currently two metrics are popularly being used widely to estimate size:

lines of code (LOC) and

function point (FP)

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 Software Size Metrics
LOC (Lines of Code):
Simplest and most widely used metric.
Comments and blank lines should not be counted.
project size is estimated by counting the number of source instructions in the developed
program.
accurate estimation of the LOC count at the beginning of a project is
very difficult.
project managers usually divide the problem into modules, and each module into
submodules and so on, until the sizes of the different leaf-level modules can be
approximately predicted.
using the estimation of the lowest level modules,
project managers arrive at the total size estimation.

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 Disadvantages of Using
LOC
Size can vary with coding style.

Focuses on coding activity alone.

Correlates poorly with quality and efficiency of code.

Penalizes higher level programming languages, code reuse, etc.

Measures lexical/textual complexity only.

does not address the issues of structural or logical complexity.

Difficult to estimate LOC from problem description.

So not useful for project planning.

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 Function Point Metrics
Function point metric (FP) was first proposed by Albrecht in early 80's.

FP can be used to:

Estimate the cost of effort required to design, code and test the software,
Predict the number of errors that will be encountered during testing,
Forecast the number of components and/or the number of projected source lines.

FPs are derived using an empirical relationship based on countable measures of

software’s information domain and assessment of its quality.

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Function Point Metric – Information Domain
Values (IDVs)
Number of External Inputs (EIs):
A set of related inputs is counted as one input.
It originates from a user or is transmitted from another application.
Number of External Outputs (EOs):
A set of related outputs is counted as one output.
It is derived within the application and provides information to the user.
It refers to reports, screens, error messages etc.
Number of External Inquiries (EQs):
Each user query type is counted.
Number of Internal Logical Files (ILFs):
Files are logically related data and thus can be data structures or physical files.
It resides within the application’s boundary.
Number of External Interface Files (EIFs):
Data transfer to other systems.
Resides external to the application.

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 Function Point Metric
(Contd.)
Computing Function Points
Once the data have been collected, the following table is computed
and a complexity value is associated with each count.
Organizations develop a criteria for determining whether a
particular entry is simple, average or complex.

IDV COUN X SIMPLE AVERAGE COMPLEX =

T
EIs 3 4 6
EOs 4 5 7
EQs 3 4 6
ILFs 7 10 15
EIFs 5 7 10
Count
Total
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 Function Point Metric (Contd.)
•

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 Function Point Metric (Contd.)
•

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 VAFs/TCFs

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 Function Point Metric
(Contd.)
Degrees of Influence for VAFs/TCFs
Each of these questions is answered using a scale that ranges
from 0 – 5
0 – No Influence
1 – Incidental
2 – Moderate
3 – Average
4 – Significant
5 - Essential

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 Case Study I: Safe Home Software
The function manages user interaction, accepting a user
password to activate or deactivate the system and allows inquires
on the status of security zones and various security sensors.
The function displays a series of prompting messages and sends
appropriate control signals to various components of the security
system.

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 Case Study I: Safe Home Software
Test Sensor Sensors

Password Zone Setting

Zone Inquiry Messages

Safe Home
User
Sensor Inquiry or Sensor status
User Interaction
Panic Button Function
Activate/Deactivate
Activate/Deactivate
Monitoring &
Password, sensors, …….. Response Sub-
Alarm Alert System
System Configuration Data
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 Case Study I: Safe Home Software
(Computing FP)
Function__Point__Metric__Safe__Home__Software.xls

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 Case Study II: Spell Checker Software
The spell-checker accepts as input, a document file and an
optional personal directory file.
Then the spell checker lists all words which are not contained in
either of these files.
The user can query the number of words processed and the
number of spelling errors which are found at any stage during
the processing.

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 Case Study II: Spell Checker Software

Document File #words processed message

Personal Directory File

#errors message
Spell Checker
Errors found Inquiry or
User Interaction User
Function
Misspelt words report
Word process Inquiry

System Configuration Data

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Case Study II: Spell Checker Software (Computing
FP)
Function__Point__Metric__Spell__Checker__Software.xls

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 Function Point Metric (CONT.)

Suffers from a major drawback:

the size of a function is considered to be independent of its complexity.
Extend function point metric:
Feature Point metric:
considers an extra parameter:
Algorithm Complexity.

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 Function Point Metric
(CONT.)
Proponents claim:
FP is language independent.
Size can be easily derived from problem description.
Opponents claim:
it is subjective --- Different people can come up with different estimates for
the same problem.

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 Case Study III: Mobile Application (Class
Assignment)
The activity has been designed and developed specifically to run
on tablet computers for teaching autistic children.
They are very important visual support systems for the autistic
children to develop skills like getting organized, acting
independently and making selections.

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 Case Study IV: Payroll Application
Transaction to input, amend and delete employee details.
Transaction to calculate pay details from timesheet data.
Transaction to print pay-to-date details for each employee.
A file of payroll details for each employee.
A personnel file maintained by another system that is accessed for name and
address details.

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