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Software project estimation : intelligent forecasting, project control, and client relationship management
Dimitrov D., Apress, New York, NY, 2020. 136 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484250-24-2)
Date Reviewed: Feb 12 2020

More like a professional handbook than a scientific study, Dimitrov is a practitioner who works on projects as a scrum master and has experience in how to communicate with business people, software designers, and technical and software engineering staff, so to keep in hand the project in the case of complex situations. He refers to the typical tensions that occur between the client side and the service provider of the project in various contracting methods, for example, fixed-price and time and materials (T&M) contracts.

In the introduction, the author declares: “Certainty or safety is a basic need.” This is the central theme of the book. Traditional waterfall methods and agile and iterative methods (for example, Scrum) are also taken into account. The book concentrates on adequate project control over the strict bureaucratic approaches, as a bookkeeping of what has happened. The main aim is forecasting to underpin whether the project has progressed in a good direction or a bad one.

The book’s basic idea is that there are several variables in a project that should be considered. One important approach is to find the appropriate size for granularity for each variable as the time estimated to deliver a work package. A second approach is to apply the central limit theorem (CLT) in the case of several variables having disparate probability distributions. A third one is to define and check what products/services are really delivered, that is, according to the Scrum concept of “Done.”

Chapter 0, “Assertions,” summarizes the basic theses of the book. Chapter 1, “The People in a Software Project,” lays the groundwork for a conceptual framework for the typical project organizations and roles and actors that may occur. Chapter 2, “The Role of Simplification,” deals with the reasonable simplification of the answers that can provide the necessary insights, but do not require too much cognitive effort to understand.

Chapter 3, “Statistics and Probability,” presents a useful method exploiting CLT and the fact that several variables with different probability distributions exist in a project environment. CLT states that the sum of several random and independent variables converges toward normal distribution.

Chapter 4 presents the proposed methods for estimation and forecasting. Its basic idea is to find the appropriate metric, granularity, and scale for each project variable to forecast and estimate project parameters. Chapter 5 introduces the concept of thrust in the context of projects with an analogy to flying. Chapter 6 discusses risk management, translating the “estimated effort” to “calendar time.”

Appendix A collects the ideas and “laws” of project management. Appendix B provides some calculation examples in a spreadsheet format that can be downloaded from the book’s companion site (https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484250242).

The book is interesting for practitioners in project management and control; however, the proposed methods should be critiqued and adjusted to the specific project environment.

Reviewer:  Bálint Molnár Review #: CR146886 (2007-0162)
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