Dan On Estimating Blog

I am looking forward to presenting at the IT Confidence conference in Mexico City this week.  I will discuss the costs and benefits of open source software, including how to obtain size and quality metrics as well as cost, Cloud costs and benefits, and introduce our Cyber Security database.

It is important to note the cloud isn't necessarily less expensive.  You still need people, processes, and products..  However those people may be doing different jobs. And some of the processes may be different.

Additionally, the easy and increasing security of the cloud seems to be exceeding on premises solutions in …

Software modernization projects are becoming increasingly critical as mainframe hardware ages out, people retire, and skillsets are lost or forgotten.  Concurrently, available resources and budgets are usually tight.  This leaves management with the challenges of dealing with the sometimes fragile software iron triangle  (scope, resources, schedule and quality.)  TO further complicate matters, agencies are increasing their cloud consumption as part of modernization.  This is fraught with challenges such as getting a viable estimate when cloud vendors make it appear as easy as filling in a web form.  Even the definition of cloud must be further quantified to discriminate between public, …

SEER supports numerous logical and physical sizing methods including but certainly not limited to Source Lines of Code (SLOC) and Function Points. We have found alternate sizing metrics to be particularly useful early in a project when less information is available. We have also found that customers without an existing in-house sizing standard benefit from alternate metrics. We therefore not only support many alternative sizing metrics out of the box, but have added several features that relieve the estimator from knowing anything about a specific size.
Galorath distinguishes itself by the way its tools can and frequently are adapted to …

Abstract: At the 2017 NASA Cost and Schedule Analysis Symposium, the authors presented a paper on the cost differences between L1/L2 missions and planetary missions. The paper provided the technical characteristics of earth-orbiting, L1/L2, and planetary orbits relative to space vehicle design and a statistical analysis of cost differences in earth orbital, L1/L2 and planetary missions was presented. The conclusions were that L1/L2 missions are more “birds of a feather” with earth orbital missions than they are with planetary missions. The authors are proposing in this abstract to use the same approach and …

By Christian B. Smart, Ph.D., CCEA
Chief Scientist, Galorath Federal

Abstract
Calibration methods such as the Enhanced Scenario-Based Method allow analysts to establish cost risk analyses that are based on objective data. Some methods currently in use rely on the normal and two-parameter lognormal distributions. Empirical data, however, indicates that a three-parameter lognormal is more appropriate for modeling cost risk. We discuss three-parameter lognormal distributions and how to calibrate cost risk using this distribution. We compare the results with traditional calibration to two-parameter normal and lognormal distributions. Calibration methods that have been published to date typically deal with only the …

In so many cases teams or management declares they are "agile" but are not really agile in the sense of the Agile Manifesto, but using that as a crutch to produce poor quality software with no discipline.  Ron Jeffries, signer of the Agile Manifesto says "stop it"

"[Agile adoptions] often lead to more interference with developers, less time to do the work, higher pressure, and demands to "go faster". This is bad for the developers, and, ultimately, bad for the enterprise as well, because doing "Agile" poorly will result, more often than not, in far more defects and

Shorter product life cycles, customer increasing demands, more market customization required?  Systems Engineering can provide your organization with a competitive advantage.  One challenge is knowing how much systems engineering is "enough."  Where is the return on investment?  How much is too much?  Some of the areas where systems engineering can help include:

• Defining the most appropriate product
• Reducing design time & rework
• Reducing errors in production
• Increasing system reliability
• Better risk identification and management
• Better traceability to decisions
• Much more

Without a robust methodology for complex problem resolution, organizations often …

Galorath's Ian Brown will be presenting this paper at the Canada ICEAA conference this week" Too often, organizations that contract for software development services are at the mercy of vendors for cost and schedule estimates. Once a program office releases a request for proposal for software development, it must somehow evaluate the validity of cost and schedule estimates that come back with the proposals. Or a program might have a limited budget or schedule but not a clear understanding of …

Joe Hamaker, PhD, Galorath Federal Inc.

Any organization that is involved in projects can benefit their bottom line by possessing the capability to perform best practice cost analysis on their projects both before projects commitments are made and throughout the project life cycle.  Based on our experiences at Galorath, most projects suffer significant cost and schedule growth from poor assumptions in the original business case analysis.  Cost overruns come right out of the projected profits and drag down the Internal Rate of Return.  I will show you that sensitivity later in …