What Is The Correct Formula To Use For Estimate To Complete For A Project Based On The Facts Shown

As a project manager/business analyst how do you determine amount of effort required by developer (in hours) to develop any given functionality?

Although this question is more than a year old I would like to point out some important facts:effort estimation in software development is never accuratenon-technical people can never determine if a developer is under or overestimating; making estimations requires good technical skillssince the developers can’t produce accurate estimates they will always add some extra time just to make sure that they can finish in timeestimates made by non-technical people are the worse and the most inaccurate; developers can’t be held accountable for not finishing the work in the time defined by non-expertsif developers make some estimations but management or business people ask them to finish in less time then almost certain the project will not deliver in time or it will but the software will have a lot of problems (large number of bugs, performance issues, technical debt)

How do you estimate time required for a software development project?

Split the project into requirementsEstimate each requirement by their level of difficulty to implement using fibonacci sequence. 1 2 3 5 8 13 21. 1 being the easiest, 21 being the hardest.If you have hard time deciding between 2 numbers, pick the bigger oneIf you estimate 21, split that into 2 requirementsThen, by looking at the actual requirements, estimate how many points you’d be able to complete in a week by doingthe easiest onesthe average onesthe hardest onesTake an average on those figuresDivide the total sum of points in the whole backlog and divide it with the averageMultiply by 1.3 giving room for initial optimism, changes in requirements, for the unknown and knowing it’s much better to give a realistic estimate and then positively surprise the client as opposed to giving a too optimistic estimate and failing to keep it. You’ll get calendar weeks with 100% dedication to this project.Estimate how much time in percentage of your total time available per day will you be able to dedicate to this project.Adjust calendar weeks by the percentage of dedicationThen answer to the question “when is it ready” by saying “provided we can dedicate x% of total working time in this particular project, it’ll be currently estimated to be ready with the current set of requirements in y calendar weeks.”Then when the work starts, keep track of how many points you actually complete in a day/week so you’ll know early in time if the estimate is going to fail giving you time to recover.Also keep track of the % of time you actually can dedicate to the project and any changes in requirements in the middle of the project. And do communicate early if you can’t dedicate as much time on the project as agreed and every time client wants to make changes to the requirements, ensure they understand that changes in mid project may risk the original time estimate and if they want, give them a new updated estimate.

How do you generate the planned percentage complete and actual percentage complete columns with MS Project 2007?

Assuming you define “percentage complete” based on duration (not work), and assuming “planned percentage complete” is defined as days from beginning of the task till now over the task’s duration, you can create a formula in a custom text field to do this. E.g.The result will look like this (new field is marked with yellow and selected):Actual percentage complete (% Complete field above) is just a standard Project field you need to add. You can see in this example that we planned to complete only 20% of the tasks duration by now, but in fact completed 40%.PS. This example was made in MSP 2013 as I don’t have 2007 version installed, but I assume all these functions are standard and should be available for 2007 as well.