I have been working on the new feature set of ORF recently and invented a proprietary method of compiling a feature set.
First I carefully harvested all major feature requests from our 2005 survey data (yes, your voice is heard :) and compiled a nice OpenOffice.Org Calc table. The rows consist of the following:
- relative weight (determined from the number of requests)
- estimated cost
- realistic estimated cost (optimistic cost multiplied with the very optimistic number of 1.8)
- relative price/value ratio (calculated from cost/weight)
- feature name
Now I am at the second step, which means that I am considering to throw away the rating part of my highly scientific table and trust myself that I can pick up the features needed by the users, just likely I did previously. Tables just do not seem to work, even if they are beautified and professional-looking, because they barely have any intuition.
Anyhow, estimations were useful. For example, I have learned that I will need 593 optimistic and 949 realistic days to implement the features requested, which means that we can complete all requests in 3 to 5 years.
Cool! Impossible is our business, I cannot wait to get started :)
posted on October 20th, 2005 @ 06:32 pm GMT+0000
Now Scotty would do it in 1 year ;-)
posted on October 21st, 2005 @ 07:56 am GMT+0000
Are you sure? :) Remember the scene when Scotty tried to communicate with a 20th century computer by _talking to the mouse_ :)
posted on March 20th, 2006 @ 09:40 am GMT+0000
[...] Well, this had to come. When we compiled the feature set for ORF 3.0, my estimation for Reporting was 35-49 days—making it the biggest single feature we ever added to ORF. This estimation assumed that reports will be generated from the current logs, but later several problems were identified with this concept. We faced with a decision: either we will generate reports that A) are useful, or just generate B) some eye-candy summary. We decided to go with the option A), which required a new logging medium and lots of related work, doubling the resources needed. This is reflected in development: we are about to reach the 49 days limit and Reporting is about halfway to be completed. [...]