Chapter 6Manual Software-Estimating Methods

This chapter includes a variety of rules of thumb that have been derived primarily from several thousand projects that utilized the traditional “waterfall” model of software development. The next chapter includes some rules of thumb derived from projects that use the Agile approaches, object-oriented methods, and some special situations such as deploying enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

The phrase manual software cost estimation refers to estimating methods that are simple enough that they can be performed mentally or, at least, using nothing more sophisticated than a pocket calculator.

Manual estimating methods remain widely used approaches to software cost estimating as the second ...

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