Technical Writing/Cost and schedule estimating

All projects cost time and money.

It is important to accurately estimate how much a project will cost.

Most projects are late and more expensive than planned.

Cost and Schedule Estimates for Documentation

According to a study on Estimating Software Costs, documentation accounts for 10% of the total cost of a project.

Automated Estimating Systems

The use of automated estimating tools can greatly improve the accuracy of cost and schedule estimates, when compared to their human equivalents.

In most projects with a Function Point score of more than 10,000 the costs of documentation and defect removal are greater than that of creating the project itself.

Function Point

Devised in the 1970s, function points are used to assess the amount of functionality available to an end user from an information system.

There are 5 types of function points:

Function Point Analysis is the amount of functionality which is relevant to and recognized by the user. As a rough estimate, there are 1000 Function Points per 125,000 lines of code.

Common Functions of Automated Estimating Tools

Advanced Functions

Variable Factors

As all projects are different, there are factors which change according to the project. A good automated estimating system will take these variables into account.