Large Application Estimation in 2 Weeks

This is post 2 from a 7 part series entitled Technical Achievements in my Last Project.

My role in this project started out by being asked to assess the existing project, provide insight into options to move it forward, with one of those options being a rewrite*. An estimation was needed for the rewrite option, so I was given 2 weeks to do it.

This post explains how I was able to pull off this massive estimation undertaking in a mere 2 weeks.

Ideally, the project documentation from the existing system could be used to give an excellent estimate, but this is a blog post, not a fairly tale. Or a thorough specification could have derived from an in depth analysis of the existing application, which business could have adjusted as needed, and used to conclude a reasonable estimate. But this is the real world, and this is a real business; and I was given a real (short) deadline.

Now I should also mention this wasn’t a 20 KLOC project, it was a fairly complex piece of software with over 500 KLOC** and almost 1800 database objects along with satellite applications. Everybody understood how this short timeframe severely limited the accuracy of anything I would be able to provide, but I was determined do the best job possible.

So my next goal was to figure out how to do a somewhat accurate estimate, provided the constraints, where I wouldn’t be setting myself up for a lynching at the end of it. I explored many different ways to get a rough idea about the entire projects scope.

This is what I finally settled on:

1. Dumped all Microsoft Access Objects
   First I modified an Access VBA script I found for exporting objects to text files and exported everything.
2. Dumped all database DDL
   I wrote a little command line utility to loop through a SQL Server database, pull the DDL for each object using the sp_helptext stored procedure, and write it out to text files.
3. Created an analysis database
   Created an analysis database primarily comprised of three tables; one for all the entities the application is comprised of, a second for linking which entity called which, and the third for linking menu items to all dependent forms.
4. Collected the names of all objects into the database
   I wrote another little command line utility to read each code file dumped out in steps 1 & 2, and add the objects name and a few other statistics.***
5. Determined all entity relationships
   I wrote another command line utility which traversed each code file, reading in the code, and determining which of the known entities it was dependent upon. This information was stored in the second linking table in the analysis database.
6. Determined dependencies of each menu item
   Wrote yet another command line application to traverse the dependencies to determine which menu item could eventually load which forms. Certain forms were ignored in the calculation including, a) previously calculated forms (obviously), b) menu item starting point forms, and c) specific forms which could load almost every other form in the application.
7. Ball park estimated each GUI component
   Loaded each of the nearly 400 forms and 200 reports, and did ball park estimations on each one, deriving what business logic I could glean from the UI. I used the CRUDLAFS estimation technique to ensure I didn’t miss any basic functionality.
   Other than trying to figure out how I would do the estimation, this was the most time consuming task. Just think, even at a mere 3 minutes per form, we are still talking 30 hours of tedious effort.
8. Totaled the estimates
9. Menu estimate breakdown
   In order to determine the time to replace one complete menu item with all functionality from that starting point, I needed to sum the estimates from all dependencies from that form onward. So I queried the times for each menu item starting point, summing all dependency estimates and added it to my report.

Now there are some serious issues with this strategy, like the high probability for; missed complexity, missed functionality, and just overall inaccuracies, but these issues were known and pointed out at the time with the estimate.

Was the estimate a success? Was it accurate? Honestly, I’d say it was a success, but it didn’t turn out to be accurate.

…. Wait! What?

How could an estimate be a success if it wasn’t accurate?

Well, let me revise that by saying some of the core underlying assumptions were changed dramatically 5 months into the project which increased complexity far beyond the simplistic web design the estimate was based on.

The big lesson learned from this task wasn’t so much about estimation as it was about managing requirements and sign off. …. But I digress. 😉

Anyway, I think the estimation I performed was well grounded in something, even if that something was not as thoroughly researched as would be ideal. I believe the executed strategy had a good return on investment.

This is post 2 from a 7 part series entitled Technical Achievements in my Last Project.

* For the record, I already had more consulting work than I could handle at the time, so while a rewrite was interesting, steering the client into an unwarranted rewrite was not beneficial for anybody.

** LOC sizes include comments, white space, and database object DML.

*** The other statistics, LOC, etc.., was actually one of my false starts in how to do this analysis.

Copyright © John MacIntyre 2010, All rights reserved