Re: Estimating Software Projects
As a PM resource management is a basic skill, any PM who has an hour long task on his critical path who hasn't secured the resource for at least half a day on an agreed date before he finalises the plan isn't a PM. Its not uncommon to have activities like this whether a key resource is only available at particular points or work specific shift patterns. that's what task constraints resource calendars are for. Project isn't perfect and the more complexity you have to use the more maintenance the plan takes but in a complex project I've yet to find a better tool.
I Started life as a dev then went into tech support then tech management before becoming a PM I've managed developments in Cobol, Oracle, .Net, SQL Server just about every variation of C, Ruby on Rails Java and now Azure and the estimating problems don't change. Its not rocket science. If you cant estimate the whole product break it down to the stage where you can estimate the time for individual components. If you can't break it down to that level we have a research piece to schedule into the project before we can come up with a delivery plan the a set of design tasks to complete long before we get to write any code. If any dev is looking at a brand new new toolset and thinking I'll just start hacking code for a real project then that project is doomed
Biting the hand that feeds IT
