RE: Estimating time?

[david -dot- locke -at- amd -dot- com]

In Shultz's The Business Side of Writing, he lays out an estimation method
that uses a history to compute an average for each of the publication
processes. Then, he had a collection of dependencies that you multiplied the
time estimate by to arrive at an effort estimate. 

I know that I've had estimates blown away by assumptions built around
dependencies. When you expect a professional writer and you get a
programmer, the effort went up by a factor of nine. The programmer made the
effort to improve his writing and luckily the factor was probably around six
by the time the project ended. 

I've never needed to pad an estimate. But, I have had estimates cut to
shreds only to have the project overrun the original uncut estimate by a
factor of three. The only risk on a doc project is if QA doesn't find a bug
big enough to fail the beta again. QA is dependable.

David 



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