IT Project management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

IT Project management - Essay Example In his article, Roetzheim writes about some of the simple methods used to estimate software development projects. Roetzheim begins by writing about estimating a project’s lifecycle and writes about the level of accuracy that can be achieved. Since inaccuracies in estimation result in uncertainties, it is always good to work and reduce inaccuracies in the early stages of software development. This means that once the project is later understood, the inaccuracy level will reduce. The author writes that one of the steps in estimation is estimating project volume. There exists different approaches to this but Roetzheim writes about Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) that uses Source Lines of Code (SLOC) as a unit of measure. This method uses effort which is the product of Linear Productivity Factor and SLOC. Effort gives an estimate of the person months for the software development project. According to Dhilon, effort is also affected by the size of the project since for a smaller projects, less time is used for communications thus individual productivity is high. Roetzheim’s article goes ahead and explains how to estimate software size and he writes that one can use direct points approach or function points approach. Direct estimation involves breaking down the project and using expert assistance to determine the number of lines of code. Function points method involves creating function points which are later converted to lines of code by a process calle d backfiring. The first step is to determine a logical flow of the software to be developed by identifying the input, processing and output points. Then raw values are extracted from the logical steps created and they are multiplied by a factor to give function points. Lines of code are obtained from the product of these function points and common conversion values