Daley Ponderings

I have been quite behind in my magazine reading, and this morning I caught up to August (2008 - at some points, it has been necessary to specify the year when saying how far behind I am).

There is an interesting article in Dr. Dobbs, by Scott Ambler, regarding methods of estimating costs of software development, and whether the typical, fixed price model is even ethical.

"fixed price refers to a project where the cost, schedule and scope are set early in the lifecycle."

His examples include very large numbers (at least compared to my current projects), which I found distracting, but the percentages are useful.  I liked this quote, which is the reason for this post:

Traditionally, we've wanted to believe in the concept that "software engineering" is 80 percent science and 20 percent art, but in practice development has proven to closer to 20 percent science and 80 percent art.  Or perhaps the 20 percent of software engineering that is art is simply 16 times harder than the 80 percent that is science.

I have a meeting in two weeks where I'll meet a potential customer for the first time, and they'll likely expect a fixed-price quote, though they did say they have enough money for the project, so hopefully, it won't be too hard to figure out what the project should cost.  I just saw another quote from a related article on the online version of th e magazine, where the author quoted someone else saying that customers expect vendors to provide a "five 9's" estimate on "one 9" of requirements. I think that's pretty accurate.