Part SIX: ESTIMATION, RISK, AND UNCERTAINTY

Business decisions are always about future actions: Should an organization use its limited resources to do this, that, or something else? Because these decisions look into the future, the cash-flow streams for the proposals being considered are necessarily estimates, and the correctness of the business decision will depend on the accuracy of those estimates. The Standish Group's CHAOS study, first mentioned in Chapter 1, showed that the average software project is 45% over budget, 63% over schedule, and delivers only 67% of the required features and functions. One contributing factor in this less-than-stellar performance is probably that the original estimates were not very good. This part explains ...

Get Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.