bryces@mrloog.WR.TEK.COM (Bryce G. Schroeder) (10/31/89)
I am the team leader for a term project in Engineering Management at Portland State University. Our team has selected as our term project, "Factors in Software Project Estimation". We have developed a brief (10 questions) survey to gather data on this topic. If you are a Project Leader for a software project, we would very much appreciate, you taking the time to answer our questionnaire. Please respond via email. If you wish, we will send you a final copy of the paper. We need your completed questionnaire by November 17th, so that we may compile and include the data in our paper. All responses will remain confidential. Thank you, - Bryce G. Schroeder bryces@mrloog.wr.tek.com Interview Questions for EMGT541 Project: Factors in Estimating Software Schedules Disclaimers: Neither your name or your companies will be used in the contents of the paper. These answers will be used to correlate findings and factors involved in estimating software projects. 1) What is the nature of your software project(s): (ie. AI, OS, compilers, development tools, embedded system) 2) How big was/is the project (budget, #people). 3) What factors do you consider when estimating the length of time of a software project? 4) What is your rule of thumb estimation technique? 5) Do you consider the software lifecycle when estimating a software project? (For example, do you break the project up into development phases and estimate each separately?) If not what other technique do you use? If yes to the first part of question #5: 5a) What factors do you consider for the requirements phase? 5b) What factors do you consider for the design phase? 5c) What factors do you consider for the implementation phase? 5d) What factors do you consider for the testing phase? 5e) What factors do you consider for the integration/documentation phase? 6) How often often are you wrong? How close are you in your estimation? 7) What steps to do you take when you find out an estimate is wrong? 8) How do you factor in risks? And how do you weigh them? 9) Do you use "lines-of-code" as an estimating factor? 10) What project goals do you optimize for: Speed of completion Development Cost Manpower Quality/Reliability Combination Thank you very much for taking the time to answer our questionnaire.