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Can Software Schedules Be Estimated?
J.P.Lewis writes "
Is programming like manufacturing, or like physics?
We sometimes hear of enormous software projects that are
canceled after running years behind schedule.
On the other hand, there are software engineering methodologies
(inspired by similar methodologies in manufacturing)
that claim (or hint at) objective estimation
of project complexity and development schedules.
With objective schedule estimates, projects should never run late.
Are these failed software projects not using proper
software engineering, or is there a deeper problem?" Read on for one man's well-argued answer, which casts doubt on most software-delivery predictions, and hits on a few of the famous latecomers.
"A recent academic paper Large Limits to Software Estimation (ACM Software Engineering Notes, 26, no.4 2001) shows how software estimation can be interpreted in algorithmic (Kolmogorov) complexity terms. An algorithmic complexity variant of mathematical (Godel) incompleteness can then easily be interpreted as showing that all claims of purely objective estimation of project complexity, development time, and programmer productivity are incorrect. Software development is like physics: there is no objective way to know how long a program will take to develop."
Lewis also provides a link to this "introduction to incompleteness (a fun subject in itself) and other background material for the paper."
There is only two type of software schedules
1) As long as it takes.
2) Take your best estimate , and double it and add 5 or something....
It prefer the as long as it takes. Other wise you end up with something like Windows Me.
Cruise TT
Software development is not a science in the normal sense. Designing large software systems is an art. It cannot be pigeonholed. Stroustrup has a lot to say about this when he describes the 'interchangable morons' concept in the 2nd edition C++ book.
Anyway, read Death march by Ed Yourdon, and the mythical man month by fred brooks, and antipatterns, any time someone asks you for an estimate say 'two weeks' and then bullshit from there on.
That is how it works in the real world. The numbers are essentially meaningless, but the bean counters and suits have to justify their existance somehow :-)
Can you imagine asking Linus when 2.5 will be ready ?
We can get it done by next week! We can do this because we have just #defined a day as having 2000 hours.
My company develops turn-key systems. Sometimes we also develop custom solutions for our customers. Our customer base has increased steadily after the dotcom crash, when we switched from products to services. One of the reasons our customers like us is that we don't bill projects by the hour. We will the project on a fixed price, not to exceed, basis.
The programmers who work with us on a contract basis don't bill us by the hour either. After we have the design and we distribute tasks and prior to submitting the final estimate, we ask contractors to place a fixed bid.
We've done six major projects like this since March, and in all cases we finished within budget and on-schedule, and the systems are currently in production. They are all mission-critical systems running in either robotics environments or high-availability networks.
Our economic motivation is then to do things well and quickly in order to increase our profits. That also enables us to move on to the next project faster than slaving over some customer in order to bill the maximum hours.
As far as development techniques go, we adopted XP earlier on and it's working for us.
Cheers!
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
True but most experienced S/W engineers or Project managers know that most projects slip because of changes to/deviations from the original project spec.
Fixed specs are much easier to engineer than those that continually change. You wouldn't easily engineer a bridge if the river banks kept moving.
I think experienced project managers know how to control the spec rather than the project. (I could be wrong - It's just what I've seen).
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
To accuratly plan a software release you must have the project, and all it's complexities and nuances down COLD. otherwise you are not giving an estimation, you are giving a guess based upon incomplete knowledge.
The bulk of the work of programming consists of getting all the complexities and nuances down cold. Once you really and completely understand what is required, coding is trivial.
This leads to a thoroughly unrealistic method of estimating software costs:
1) Work for months on the specs.
2) Get the customer to sign on to those incredibly detailed specs, even though he doesn't understand them.
3) Go and code it, no spec changes allowed.
8-)
The article mainly talks about the mathematics of estimating complexity. This is a lot like the proof that you cannot determine when or whether a computer program will end -- it's true for pathological programs, but it has little relevance for the real world. You try to write the code so the conditions for the program to end are clear. If it gets into an endless loop, you probably got a conditional expression backwards and you'll recognize it immediately once you figure out which loop is running endlessly... Likewise, there may be well-defined specifications for which it is impossible to estimate the coding time, but the usual problem is poorly-defined specs, which obviously makes any estimate a guess.
I'd have to agree with this. There are two major problems, the first being that the users don't really know what they want and the second being that almost always, the problems being solved are new problems, and therefore it's difficult to know what solution will best solve the problem.
The issue is not physics versus manufacturing, it is scope and cost containment like is done in manufacturing. As a person who has lead multi-million dollar projects, I have grown used to the cliché that goes something like this:
If we built homes like software we would all be living in the street, penniless...
The major issues I have seen revolve around a lack of scope and cost control. In many cases it is because there is little penalty for being late or over budget. In cases where penalties exist it is often beneficial to then over estimate the effort or cost required. Then once the money is approved, using it is becomes easy.
Going back to the analogy consider the following:
Scope
If you were building a house, each piece has a specified cost, known in advance to a very large degree. In addition, altering the scope itself often incurs a penalty, because the work is not done by the owner. You plan a three bedroom, 1.5 bath home. Midway through planning you decide to make it a two bath home instead. The architect will charge the "re-scoping" fee and the builder will add the material fee. Now do the same after construction has begun. The architect gets their fee, the builder adds the material and resource costs, plus a "revision" fee for changing your mind after construction begins.
During a software project, it is common for individuals to approach the developers and ask to expand the scope. This would be analogous to approaching one of the work crew and asking them to just add the extra half a bath. The difference is the work crew would get fired, and the developer gets bonus points for adding the feature, either directly or indirectly.
If the developer chooses not to do it, or pushes them to the project manager, the client may label them uncooperative or difficult to work with. The project manager not wanting to be labeled either may coerce, cajole, or beg the developer to accomplish it, without a scope revision. Failure to do so by the developer results in real financial impact at some point, and offers little incentive to hold the line.
Cost
I call this the "Porsche syndrome".
I go into the Porsche dealership and see a new 911 Carrera Coupe. Smiling the dealer offers to sell it at a deep discount, with options and accessories $84,000 (U.S.). Whewwww baby!!! I cannot afford that. "Look," I tell him, "my wife will never approve that, you need to get it down to $28,500 tops." Would any of us expect to have the price cut down? By half or more?
Okay, how about "Look, what will it take to get it under $30,000? Seriously now, what do I have to give up" As the dealer is escorting me to the door he explains the only way I will get this car under $30k is with a mask and a gun or from a scrap metal dealer.
Yet, daily we go to developers and tell them to do the same. We ask for an estimate and then go back with "This is too much, it needs to be smaller or it won't get approved!" --Insert blank stare here--- The idea that if something cannot be cost justified it should not be done, is often lost in the "request" itself.
To nearly guarantee a project is on budget and time requires things many companies are unwilling to provide. Strict scope control procedures, with oversight by the person responsible for the money. That means each change, regardless of how trivial must be approved by someone above the project management team with business justification. It also means that requests for scope change cannot be made to developers directly, by anyone.
I was very happy with the people who built my home. When speaking to many of my friends and coworkers who built their homes, they describe it as a process akin to having their flesh removed. Everything required such effort and detail that many would not do it again.
Most of them were looking for the relationship to be like one at the office. We all want to get along and help each other out. This is not a commercial arrangement, and when we put the commercial context around it, we see it many offices lack structure.
Internal organizations can be setup like commercial ones, but it is usually unwelcome as the perception is everyone should be working for the greater good of the company and this has the appearance of bureaucracy. Even if inaccurate, everyone "wanting to get along" prevents it from being implemented.
Yes but. The important components of a skyscraper are steel beams. Put them up correctly, after calculating loads and stresses, and it doesn't matter what the twenty tons of stuff you have sitting on the 27th floor is. It doesn't matter if the beams come from different foundaries, either, because the specs are clear enough (dimensions, strength, where the bolt holes are).
Now try putting together a typically complex business software solution, meshing a bunch of different, reasonably good, existing programs and components with some custom code and configuration. Even where there are reasonably good standards spec'd in some areas of the project, if you're not solving new problems it shouldn't be a software engineering project at all - it should just be system administration using the available solutions. That it's real software engineering means you're running into unpredictable surprises where the components at hand don't fit without a great deal of extra labor.
A parallel can be found in work on the portions of the New York City infrastructure that are under the streets: We still have wooden water mains in some places from the mid-1800s, mixed with gas, electric, steam pipes, sewer, subways, gas lines ... most of which was not documented to current standards on either installation or subsequent changes, despite most of it being reasonably well done by the standards of its time (pretty amazing, those wooden water mains still working, right?).
So what happens when we finally go in to improve one of the services - say, lay new water mains? Other stuff is found that's in the way where you didn't expect it, or that need's fixing on examination when you didn't expect it. Meanwhile you've got the street ripped up but you have to cap it again quickly or traffic is too snarled for too long. So a single block's 4-week project can stretch out for over a year - dig up the street, fix one problem, discover more, recap while designing and provisioning the next stage, repeat - because it's all stuff that needs to be done once you get into it, that can't be properly assessed until you get into it.
Well, software in the real world isn't as old as New York, but if anything it's more complex, and the layers of crufty stuff that have to be accommodated in current projects are as considerable, and often as poorly documented by current standards (which will always advance so as to obsolete whatever we do now). Building a skyscraper, by contrast, is just a sysadmin job. Put the beams and bolts in the normal places, and it stands.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Painless Software Schedules is a great one and you will get sucked in just following the links from this one essay.
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
Underestimation as a Marketing Tactic
AKA "Vaporware". Even if marketing knew when a product would be shippable, a particularly cinical marketing department may claim it to be earlier, thus freezing competitor's development.
Lack of Feedback (Moving Targets)
Software engineers are particularly bad at estimating because they have never done what they estimated. They are given a large project, give a large estimate, start working on it, and the project changes in the middle in a major way. This is a moving target; the estimate no longer applies. Major law of software development: You cannot change the spec or the development team on the project without impacting the real ship date. If you don't re-assess the estimated ship date, you are simply fooling yourself. Thus, they don't have any clue whether they hit the estimate or not. One way to defend against this is to break the project down into bite-sized pieces and estimate them; a small piece gives you a chance to do precisely what you estimated. Once you have that, you can have somebody track your estimates, and come back saying something like "On average, you go one third over your estimates. Add a third to your estimates from now on, and we'll be accurate".
Management Estimates
Often, engineers don't do the estimate. The management or marketing people tell you what must be done, and how long you have. Sometimes this is done explicitly; other times, management may have a number in mind and shame a software team into agreeing with it by laughing off any number that doesn't match theirs. Business people often negotiate the ship date with the geeks, like any negotiate with any other vendor. To a suit, vendor negotiations are how you determine the "margin", or how much the vendor is making (like when you buy a car, you and the dealer come to a number that determines the dealer's margin). This doesn't work in in-house software develoment because geeks hold back precious little "slack" or "margin" (they don't get paid profits, they get paid salaries); in a decent shop, geeks program at flank speed all the time and always give the project 100%.
See Ed Yourdon's Death March or any of Ward Cunningham's Extreme Programming books for more details, and ways to avoid the above traps. Yourdon suggests that the head geek has to take a hard stand in scheduling to prevent business interests from setting both the project spec and the ship date. He especially tells you never to negotiate schedule, and to help the suits understand why you never do. Whatever number you estimate doesn't affect the actual ship date, so playing with that number is simply fooling yourself.
Extreme Programming actually has a "planning game" (sort of a ritual dance) which places business interests and geeks on the same side of the table. Two big rules are "The geeks may not reject any part of the spec" and "The suits may not reject any part of the estimate". Once the suits set the spec, both teams break it down into pieces-parts, line them up in order of what gets done first and the geeks give their estimates. From there, the suits can choose the ship date (and can instantly see how much product will be ready by then), or can choose a certain amount of project completion (and can instantly see the ship date). The fun part about this method is that the suits can change their minds at any time by changing, adding, or removing pieces-parts, and can instantly see how that affects the ship date. The other fun part is that breaking up the project into pieces-parts allows developers to do a (small) project they estimated. This allows people to track estimated versus real time, and to give developers feedback that lets them make better estimates. Such a team will start off with bad estimates like everybody else, but they will be able to improve rapidly.
--The basis of all love is respect
The article presents an interesting arguement for why a completely new software project must have an arbitrarily large upper bound for time/quality estimates and can have no lower bound.
But herein lies the rub -- exactly how many software systems are "completely new?"
Damn few!!
The average software project in an average industry will be primarily a repackaging of previously solved problems.The majority of integration tasks will be sufficiently similar to previous integration tasks as to be known.
You will be left with a small number of "sub problems" which are unique and new. But now we have a situation where the caveats of the article are very important. Specifically, if we have decomposed the programming tasks to a sufficient degree, it should be the case that the estimation is tractable.
Also, it should be noted, that the author assumes that a good estimate is one obtained through formal methods that is objectively defensible. However, in project maangement, a good estimate is defined as one that is believable and acceptable to all stakeholders in the process. The method for obtaining the estimate is not important.
Moreover, good project management will include some significant up-front analysis. One common (at least common to companies with good PM'ing track records) is to run "monte-carlo" simulations of project work with large variances in schedule-v-actual work. With a run of a few thousand simulations, those processes that are most important to the time and budget performance of the project.
These "key" work packages are often non-obvious without this type of simulation work. However, with a good work breakdown structure and a good simulator, it is possible to generate a reasonably accurate picture of project performance based on what is not known.
This means that in the "real world" of business, the article's claim is irrelevant!!
We don't NEED objectively defined and defensible estimates. Instead we need estimates that the project stakeholders (which includes the people doing the work) can agree to.
We don't NEED our estimates to be generated by formal methodologies. Subjective estimates backed up by years of experience are just as good, and often better, from a planning perspective.
This whole article strikes me as another programmer trying to show how dumb the business people are. Hey folks, good business people KNOW that estimating is hard and that it isn't objective. But just because something isn't objective doesn't mean it can't be done well. It is possible to build models that compensate for unknowns if you can do enough decompossing of the problem to limit the unknowns to a well defined, small manageable few.
So, in the view of this PM, this is all just academic and has no bearing on the real world.
As silly as this paper is, most responses to it are off-topic. What he is trying to show is that there is a good case for saying there is no general, algorithmic way to estimate how long it will take to do a given software project. What he isn't saying is that you can not make reasonable estimates on a given project.
"You tell me the month, I'll tell you the year"
sulli
RTFJ.
It looks like several people (well, more than several) posted responses without reading beyond the lead-in. If you're one of them, yes, the argument here is in the general ballpark of "software estimation is hard or impossible", but it actually says something more specific than that.
The article does NOT say the following:
The article DOES say
From this, it does NOT conclude either of the points 1,2 above. Instead, it concludes:
Now some of the response posts, paraphrased:
No, it does not say this.
It also does not say this.
No, the article distinguishes subjective and objective estimates, and specifically discusses the case of an objective estimate with bounds in detail.
Ok, but slightly off topic: the article is specifically talking about those who claim objective estimates.
And where did you get an objective estimate of the complexity of a new project? Read the article...
Yes, you are. Your boss is monitoring you, get back to work.
Certainly. The 'manufacturing' camp of software estimators (Humphrey quote in the supplementary material) say or hint that software construction can be made into a repeatable, fairly boring process where projects are always on time and programmers are like factory workers. This may or may not be true (I don't think it is), but regardless: to make this view seem more science than philosophy some of these people have fallen into the trap of cloaking their estimating process with formal notation and claiming or hinting objectivity. This part is wrong.
On the contrary, [conclusions to the article and the supplementary material]: