In the market of the development of applications for start up business, the estimation of the projects is one of the most crucial tasks. It depends largely the success or failure of all the project. Detours, delays, incidentals and other external factors affect the development time and in the start up world there is not time for a complete planification of project.
However, it’s our duty devote time and effort required for find a way of standardize the estimation process. Why standardize? for reduce the effort whenever a new customer appears. The standardization processes allows invest the effort once.

There are many techniques for the estimation. But, I have some shortcuts for start up projects that usually consider:

• Define some available resources:
  • Size of workteam.
  • Capacity of the members of team -each member of the team should have a different weighting of the time effort-. For this reason we have take a standard time unit, and weighting each member according to their abilities, e.g. 1 hour for Technical Leader = 1.4 hours for SSr. developer.
  • Available technology.
• Divide the project in small tasks, as small as possible.
• Add 5% for testing tasks. Each part must be tested and revised.
• Add 2% for documentation of the most important elements.
• Add 5% for planification and organization of the workteam (meetings, analysis of the system flow, etc).
• Add 10% for contingency and possibles delays.

Once we have define this, we create a small guide for follow each time we have to estimate.

And now… Fabiana Cantilo