Rough Order Of Magnitude Estimate

When a project is started and Requirements are not specified in great detail, the exact project Budget cannot be calculated without mistakes (due to the well-known Cone of Uncertainty). Concrete numbers in this stage will lead to an ineffective situation in which you may experience loss.

To avoid the possibility of such an ineffective situation, we provide a Rough Order-of-Magnitude (ROM) Estimate of costs and time when Requirements are not specified in the early stages of the project. The ROM Estimate is based on Vision document that includes a list of Features.

The ROM Estimate includes the following project parameters which are the foundation for estimation:

Parameter	Explanation
Interval, staff-hours	Project may be completed within this range if all Requirements will be within the scope specified by Vision document.
Accuracy, %	ROM Estimate is created by three estimators. Accuracy equals to 100% minus the biggest difference between one individual estimate and the mean.
Time estimate, weeks	Minimum and maximum duration of the project in weeks.
Retainer	Amount of staff-hours required to complete Inception Phase in order to produce detailed Specification and exact project Budget.
KSLOC estimated	An estimate of Kilo Software Lines Of Code to be written in the project. We calculate and estimate only hand-written, non-empty, non-comment lines of code.
Unadjusted FPs	Function Points as an output parameter from COCOMO-II estimate method. In a simplified approach, function points could be compared with software functions or class methods.
Features, BC/WC/ML	List of Features from Vision document that were used by estimators. Best Case (BC), Worst Case (WC), and Most Likely (ML) are the output numbers of three-point estimate method. The numbers are just programming staff-hours by the estimate of programmers.

In order to calculate the numbers above, we use our own patent-pending estimation method, that is based on COCOMO-II Software Cost Estimation Technology, PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) and Wideband Delphi.

Completion of the ROM Estimate takes up to 48 hours.

Projects smaller than 1500 staff-hours and larger than 5,000 staff-hours are not subject to ROM Estimation.