Some notes for Software Engineering -- Estimating

by Herbert J. Bernstein © Copyright Herbert J. Bernstein, 2002

Estimating

There is no algorithmic way to estimate the time and resources that will be required to do an arbitrary software project, for the same reasons that we cannot write a program that will determine if an arbitrary program will halt. (See http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Work/Softestim/softestim.html, Mathematical Limits to Software Estimation, supplementary materials, by J. P. Lewis). However, there are heuristics we can apply to try to estimate many software projects.