How big is your project?

It is quite remarkable. Over the years I have gathered a lot of experience in use case modeling. That’s where smart use cases came from – if you want to know more on those, please read the book. Along with smart use cases comes a pragmatic and easy applicable estimation technique, which I’ve called smart estimation. With this technique every smart use case that is either modeled or counted is ranked on a scale that ranges from 1..5, 8 or 10. Because smart use cases are small and equally granular, the technique works fine. Hope this will do for a small introduction, otherwise please read all there is at the wiki.trinidadplatform.org.

The amazing part is that so little people are actually aware of the size of their projects. Since some time I’ve been doing seminars on estimating with smart use cases, both in the Netherlands and in Belgium. For the next edition in Brussels see www.itworks.be. The first question I ask my audience when I start is a straightforwards one: what is the size of your current project? And I don’t care how you express it; in function point (yuk), classes, entities, lines of code, empty pizza boxes, use case points, whatever. The number of people that can actually express the size of their project in the audience never seizes to amaze me: 1 in 80 during the last edition, 3 in 48 in the previous. It’s incredible that after 50 years of software development we are still in the dark.