4.1. ESTIMATION AND SCHEDULING CONCEPTS

Before we discuss the approach taken at Infosys, this section describes some concepts relating to estimation and scheduling. Effort estimation usually takes place in the early stages of a project, when the software to be built is being understood. It may be redone later when more information becomes available.

Highly precise estimates are generally not needed. Reasonable estimates in a software project tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy—people work to meet the schedules (which are derived from effort estimates). Indeed, in software projects, one cannot even precisely answer the question, “Is this estimate accurate?” because the only way to ascertain the accuracy of an estimate is to compare it with ...

Get Software Project Management in Practice 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.