Re: Estimating Help system development time

[Scott Havens <SHavens -at- ELCOTEL -dot- COM>]

        I'm sure *somebody* must have done some studies in this area.
It's amazing that there hasn't been any response to speak of so far.
I'm sure the nature of the project would have some impact on how long
Help development would take.  (Highly technical, complex SW systems
would take longer, even with existing printed documents.  And anyway, it
might NOT be easier to convert existing documentation to Help than to
simply start from scratch, using the documentation as a reference.)

        RoboHELP (and RoboHTML) offers a tracking mechanism (via the
Topic Properties/Status tab) for those who choose to use it.  However,
as my instructor explained when I took a Help authoring course, Blue
Sky's chosen unit (hours) is not very realistic.  You can only enter
integer values in the field, and many Help topics take significantly
*less* than an hour to create.  Thus, he suggested that you simply enter
the number of *minutes* the topic took, instead.  (If it took you a
half-hour to develop the topic, you would enter 30 "hours" on the Status
tab's "Time" field.  Any obligatory management reports would then be
annotated to indicated that the units are Minutes, rather than Hours.

        So how about it?  Hasn't anyone developed a set of "typical"
numbers for Help authoring tasks?  I would like to know the answer to
this, also!

        SRH

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Saleh, Jamal [SMTP:Jamal -dot- Saleh -at- AP -dot- BDI -dot- GTE -dot- COM]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 1999 12:19 PM
> To:   TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject:      Estimating Help system development time
>
> Do standards exist for estimating how long it takes to develop an Help
> system using RoboHTML?  Is there a conversion ratio between number of
> pages
> and hours of development time if the system is to be based on existing
> print
> documentation?
>
> I am looking for approximations in the absence of solid metrics.
> (Experienced guesses will work too.)
>
> __________________________
> Jamal Saleh
> jamal -dot- saleh -at- ap -dot- bdi -dot- gte -dot- com
>
>
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