Reference no: EM132454659

Estimating Project Effort
Learning Objectives

This project has been designed to re-enforce the following concepts of developing software solutions:

• Requirements Elicitation
• Requirements Analysis
• Functional Decomposition
• Task Identification
• Effort Estimating

• In addition, students will be introduced to the reality of quickly developing effort estimates with poor, incomplete and possibly conflicting information.

Scenario

• The Project Management Institute (PMI) has invited your company to respond to their Request for Proposal (RFP) regarding the development of a Project Management System. Their requirements are documented in "Project Management System Requirements v3.docx."

• Before dedicating a lot of time and effort developing a proposal, your company wants to determine a ballpark effort for the project.
• Your manager has requested that you review the customer's requirements and provide a "quick and dirty" effort estimate. He will hold meetings to discuss how to develop the effort estimate and the requirements. 
• You are encouraged to seek your manager's advice is developing the effort estimate.

You shall submit via Canvas a document with the following sections containing the information requested.

Discussion 1. Effort Estimate

• Estimate the effort necessary to complete the project. The estimate should be in units of days or weeks. Work showing how the effort estimate was determined is much more important than the actual effort estimate. This work must be well organized and clearly presented.

Discussion 2. Assumptions

• Identify and describe all assumptions made to determine the effort estimate.

• The assumptions section shall be formatted in a list and each list element shall be described in a paragraph following the list element.

Discussion 3. Effort Estimating Method

1. Describe the method(s) used to determine the effort estimate.

• If multiple methods were used, separate subsections should be created for each method.

 Discussion 4. Advantages/Disadvantages

1. Identify and describe the advantages and disadvantages of the method(s) used.

• This section should be separated into two subsections - the first for advantages of the methodology used to estimate the effort and the second subsection for the disadvantages of the methodology. If multiple methods are used, then separate subsections should be created for each method and the advantages and disadvantages be documented within these subsections.