Format:  ZIP file
Cost:      Available free when you license the ISBSG Estimating, Benchmarking & Research Suite or when you become an ISBSG Special Reports & Web Subscriber.

The Early Estimate Checker is a software tool that uses industry data from the Estimating, Benchmarking & Research Suite and regression analysis to quickly generate estimates of the work effort and elapsed time (duration), required to carry out and complete a software development project, plus project delivery rate and speed of delivery.

It can be used to:

• generate initial rough estimates in the early stages of software development projects
• validate existing project estimates (eg. bottom-up estimates generated from a project’s work breakdown)
• assess the reasonableness and likely risk associated with a quoted estimate (where on the range from most conservative to most optimistic is the estimate positioned?)

Using the Early Estimate Checker tool, estimates for project work effort and elapsed time can be generated by simply entering the project size - expressed in IFPUG function points. By default, estimates consider all the validated data points contained in the current release of the ISBSG Data. However, a combination of development platform, primary programming language type and development type can be selected to generate more specific estimates.

In addition to generating estimates that indicate the most likely values for project work effort and elapsed time, the Early Estimate Checker provides a confidence interval function that can be used to generate estimate ranges. These estimate ranges can be used to highlight the range of values from most conservative to most optimistic that can be expected to be achieved for a particular software project.

The Early Estimate Checker has been designed to complement existing software estimating tools and techniques.