This is one of an occasional series on how 3hv conducts its business processes. You can read more here, subscribe to be notified whenever a new article is posted or find out why hiring 3hv will benefit your business.

Often, a client has a good idea of exactly what it is they want building. This, in theory, makes my job very easy. Take the list of requirements, figure out how long they will take to build, calculate the price, sign the contract. Easy peasy. Lemon squeezy.

Of course, if it was that easy then IT would be known as one of the world’s favourite industries. As opposed to smelly geeks in bad T-shirts who cost a fortune, building stuff that never works.

The reason for this is that estimating a project is hard. If you were estimating the cost of building a bridge you have hundreds of years of previous experience to draw upon - you know the tolerances of the materials involved, you have a number of different architectural styles to draw upon. In other words, it is a known problem. Unfortunately, in software, often we are building stuff for the first time. We don’t know how the server will react. We don’t know what the best design to use is. That’s just the way it is with a young industry.

But, things are changing. In fact, there are libraries of patterns to draw upon - the famous “Gang of Four” book should be essential reading for every software developer. Ruby on Rails takes those patterns and forces you to follow them. It’s part of why I love it so. There are known procedures to follow to make your server scale.

And if you break the project down and divide it in small enough chunks (providing the actual requirements capture is accurate) you can build a decent estimate. One of the key features being that I assess the risk of each task and give myself some leeway if there is a chance that I may not know how to do things or that the feature may be misspecified.

The attached flowchart shows how I do it … New Project Estimate. Feel free to take a look - and leave your thoughts below.

This is the blog of 3hv Limited - a small software company based in Leeds, England. You can find out more by visiting the web-site - or just subscribe to be notified when new articles are posted - both here and on the technical blog.