Software Estimation Without Guessing

Estimating software development often produces more angst than value, but it doesn't have to. Identify the needs behind estimate requests and determine how to meet those needs simply and easily. Choose estimation techniques based on current needs and available information, gaining benefit while reducing cost and effort. Detect bad assumptions that might sink your project if you don't adjust your plans. Discover what to do when an estimate is wrong, how to recover, and how to use that knowledge for future planning. Learn to communicate about estimates in a healthy and productive way, maximizing advantage to the organization and minimizing damage to the people. In a world where most developers hate estimation and most managers fear disappointment with the results, there is hope for both. It requires giving up some widely held misconceptions. Let go of the notion that "an estimate is an estimate" and estimate for the particular need you, and your organization, have. Realize that estimates have a limited shelf-life, and reestimate frequently if it's important. When reality differs from your estimate, don't lament; mine that disappointment for the gold that can be the longer-term jackpot. Estimate in comparison to past experience, by modeling the work mathematically, or a hybrid of both. Learn strategies for effective decomposition of work and aspects of the work that likely affect your estimates. Hedge your bets by comparing the results of different approaches. Find out what to do when an estimate proves wrong. And they will. They're estimates, after all. You'll discover that you can use estimates to warn you of danger so you can take appropriate action in time. Learn some crucial techniques to understand and communicate with those who need to understand. Address both the technical and sociological aspects of estimation, and you'll help your organization achieve its desired goals with less drama and more benefit. What You Need: No software needed, just your past experience and concern for the outcomes.

Often referred to as the “black art” because of its complexity and uncertainty, software estimation is not as difficult or puzzling as people think. In fact, generating accurate estimates is straightforward—once you understand the art of creating them. In his highly anticipated book, acclaimed author Steve McConnell unravels the mystery to successful software estimation—distilling academic information and real-world experience into a practical guide for working software professionals. Instead of arcane treatises and rigid modeling techniques, this guide highlights a proven set of procedures, understandable formulas, and heuristics that individuals and development teams can apply to their projects to help achieve estimation proficiency. Discover how to: Estimate schedule and cost—or estimate the functionality that can be delivered within a given time frame Avoid common software estimation mistakes Learn estimation techniques for you, your team, and your organization * Estimate specific project activities—including development, management, and defect correction Apply estimation approaches to any type of project—small or large, agile or traditional Navigate the shark-infested political waters that surround project estimates When many corporate software projects are failing, McConnell shows you what works for successful software estimation.

How to always be on time, and not risk missing important deadlines or go over budget This book is the result of many years of hard work, and plenty of lessons learned. I wrote it because I believe we can do better than the accepted "status quo" in the software industry. It took me years to learn what I needed to learn to come up with my version of the #NoEstimates approach. You can do it in weeks! The techniques and ideas described here will help you explore the #NoEstimates universe in a very practical and hands-on manner. You will walk through Carmen's story. Carmen is a senior, very experienced project manager who is now confronted with a very difficult project. One would say, an impossible project. Through the book, and with the help of Herman, Carmen discovers and slowly adopts #NoEstimates which helps her turn that project around. Just like I expect it will help with the project you are in right now. The book also includes many concrete approaches you can use to adopt #NoEstimates, or just adopt those practices on their own.

Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.

Almost every software project begins with the utterances, “What will this cost?” and “When will this project be done?” Once those words are spoken, project stakeholders begin to wrestle with how to produce an estimate. Accurately estimating the cost or time to complete a software project is a serious problem for many software engineers, developers and project managers who struggle with costs running double original estimates, putting their careers at risk. It is reported that nearly 50% of all software projects are shelved and that one of the major causes is poor estimation practices. If developing software for internal use, poor estimates can represent a significant drain on corporate profits. Worldwide growth in the number of companies specializing in the development of software for use by other companies is staggering. India alone has nearly 20,000 such companies. Intense competition has led to an increased demand for fixed-bid pricing in client/vendor relationships, and has made effective cost estimation even more important and, in many cases, critical to a firm's survival. There are many methods of estimation. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses, proponents and opponents. Knowing how and which one to use on a given project is key to developing acceptable estimates for either internal or external projects.Software Estimation Best Practices, Tools, & Techniques covers all facets of software estimation. It provides a detailed explanation of the various methods for estimating software size, development effort, cost, and schedule, including a comprehensive explanation of Test Effort Estimation. Emphasizing that software estimation should be based on a well-defined process, it presents software estimation best practices and shows how to avoid common pitfalls. This guide offers direction on which methods are most appropriate for each of the different project types commonly executed in the software development space and criteria for selecting software estimation tools. This comprehensive desk reference explains software estimation from scratch to help the beginner and features advanced techniques for more experienced estimators. It details project scheduling, including resource leveling and the concept of productivity, as applicable to software estimators, demonstrating the many benefits of moving from the current macro-productivity approach to a micro-productivity approach in software estimation. Software Estimation Best Practices, Tools, & Techniques: A Complete Guide for Software Project Estimators caters to the needs of all software project stakeholders, from novice to expert. It provides the valuable guidance needed to estimate the cost and time required to complete software projects within a reasonable margin of error for effective software development.

Access the power of bare-metal systems programming with Scala Native, an ahead-of-time Scala compiler. Without the baggage of legacy frameworks and virtual machines, Scala Native lets you re-imagine how your programs interact with your operating system. Compile Scala code down to native machine instructions; seamlessly invoke operating system APIs for low-level networking and IO; control pointers, arrays, and other memory management techniques for extreme performance; and enjoy instant start-up times. Skip the JVM and improve your code performance by getting close to the metal. Developers generally build systems on top of the work of those who came before, accumulating layer upon layer of abstraction. Scala Native provides a rare opportunity to remove layers. Without the JVM, Scala Native uses POSIX and ANSI C APIs to build concise, expressive programs that run unusually close to bare metal. Scala Native compiles Scala code down to native machine instructions instead of JVM bytecode. It starts up fast, without the sluggish warm-up phase that's common for just-in-time compilers. Scala Native programs can seamlessly invoke operating system APIs for low-level networking and IO. And Scala Native lets you control pointers, arrays, and other memory layout types for extreme performance. Write practical, bare-metal code with Scala Native, step by step. Understand the foundations of systems programming, including pointers, arrays, strings, and memory management. Use the UNIX socket API to write network client and server programs without the sort of frameworks higher-level languages rely on. Put all the pieces together to design and implement a modern, asynchronous microservice-style HTTP framework from scratch. Take advantage of Scala Native's clean, modern syntax to write lean, high-performance code without the JVM. What You Need: A modern Windows, Mac OS, or Linux system capable of running Docker. All code examples in the book are designed to run on a portable Docker-based build environment that runs anywhere. If you don't have Docker yet, see the Appendix for instructions on how to get it.

Fearlessly change the design of your iOS code with solid unit tests. Use Xcode's built-in test framework XCTest and Swift to get rapid feedback on all your code - including legacy code. Learn the tricks and techniques of testing all iOS code, especially view controllers (UIViewControllers), which are critical to iOS apps. Learn to isolate and replace dependencies in legacy code written without tests. Practice safe refactoring that makes these tests possible, and watch all your changes get verified quickly and automatically. Make even the boldest code changes with complete confidence. Manual code and UI testing get slower the deeper your navigation hierarchy goes. It can take several taps just to reach a particular screen, never mind the actual workflow tests. Automatic unit testing offers such rapid feedback that it can change the rules of development. Bring testing to iOS development, even for legacy code. Use XCTest to write unit tests in Swift for all your code. iOS developers typically reserve unit tests for their model classes alone. But that approach skips most of the code common to iOS apps, especially with UIViewControllers. Learn how to unit test these view controllers to expand your unit testing possibilities. Since good unit tests form the bedrock for safe refactoring, you're empowered to make bold changes. Learn how to avoid the most common mistakes Swift programmers make with the XCTest framework. Use code coverage to find holes in your test suites. Learn how to identify hard dependencies. Reshape the design of your code quickly, with less risk and less fear.

The office isn't as essential as it used to be. Flexible working hours and distributed teams are replacing decades of on-site, open-plan office culture. Wherever you work from nowadays, your colleagues are likely to be somewhere else. No more whiteboards. No more water coolers. And certainly no Ping-Pong. So how can you organize yourself, ship software, communicate, and be impactful as part of a globally distributed workforce? We'll show you how. It's time to adopt a brand new mindset. Remote working is here to stay. Come and join us. Remote working is on the rise. Whether or not we are remote workers, it is likely we are all part of a global workforce. We need to learn to interact remotely, because we are all remote from someone in some way. Rather than simply simulating the way we'd usually work together via digital means, we have to learn new communication skills and adopt a different mindset in order to work remotely effectively, efficiently, and, most importantly, healthily. We'll start by getting you set up with the right equipment and habits. Then, we'll learn the mindset of treating everyone as remote, and conquer both synchronous and asynchronous communication. You'll learn how to produce amazing artifacts, how to communicate clearly, and how to manage yourself and your teams. Then we'll look at the bigger picture: from measuring the remote readiness of your workplace, to creating a handbook for your team, to exploring remote-first culture and tackling burnout and mental well-being. Fundamentally we'll see that adopting a remote-working mindset can do wonders for our organization, our effectiveness, and our impact in our careers. It can even create a more diverse and inclusive industry for us all to work in. So what are you waiting for? The remote future is now. Be a part of it. What You Need: There are no prerequisites to reading this book, other than having had some experience of working in the software industry and a healthy curiosity.