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by Florian and Rolf.
Original Post: Reality strikes.
Feed Title: Heulen wie ein Schlosshund
Feed URL: http://www.contegix.com/blog/index.rdf
Feed Description: Florian and Rolf talk about the trials and tribulations of software development in the java world.
Over the past week I have spent much of my time discussing the requirements with my customer. During this time I was able to produce a full list of proposed story cards with base line estimates. With the small amount of analysis that we have achieved in this time, I am not prepared to estimate any story card less than 0.5 Ideal Developer Days (IDD). However, my stories are small enough that I feel that none are larger than 4.0 IDD.
So this week I presented the customer with what I had produced. After convincing the customer that we really do need to concentrate on high priority scope only, we were able to reduce scope considerably. Even still we ended up with a little more than 100 IDD's worth of development.
It is fair to say that our customer, when he first saw our estimate, well.... panicked. This reaction is quite understandable...after all he had been reassured by Reg that it was only 4 weeks worth of development and that was with out restricting scope. However, this was the first time that our client had seen every task involved in developing his system broken down. He soon realised that what he was looking at was something close to reality. Fortunately for us our client is a very open minded and realises that we have more experience in software development. The discussion soon turned to... "How can we cut scope further so that he could have something of value in 4-8 weeks?" That would be the right question for him to ask.
Wow...I must admit I did not expect this reaction from the customer. On the other hand I was not going to work on the project if the true amount of work had not been made known to the customer. So in the last week I have gone from wondering how I am going to handle the situation when the customer has unrealistic expectations, thanks to Reg, to a more manageable situation.
Scope is still large. We still have a lot of work to do, but at least the customer is on the same plain as us now.
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