Estimating Quality Documentation?

["Anthony Markatos" <tonymar -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Elna Tymes said:

It's (estimating) a little like planning a trip: you know where you're 
going, and you know the route to get there, but there may be delays due to 
construction or car problems or other unforeseen incidents.  You plan ahead 
as best you can and be flexible enough
to deal with the unexpected.  And page counts are about the reasonably 
useful measure of a writer's productivity, going in.

Tony Markatos responds:

For one of the projects for which I am most proud of, I averaged about one 
page every three days.  This was a highly end user focused software 
requirements spec for a complex business system.  In order to tie the pages 
of text together, I had to create data flow diagrams, entity relationship 
diagrams, and major parts of a data dictionary (this is where a major part 
of my time went).

Estimating was very difficult; it was not until I was well into the analysis 
effort (which took about 6 months in total) that I knew the system well 
enough that I could "chunk" it down into logical equal-sized parts (the 
major prerequisite for estimating such projects.)

For one of the projects for which I am least proud of, I averaged about six 
pages per day.  It was a real "End User? What's an End User?" type of 
project. (No moral judgements please; on this one, I was only following 
management's directives.)  Estimating was easy; I did about six pages on 
Monday, and (baring any unforeseen obstacles) I knew that I was going to do 
about six pages on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.

Tony Markatos
(tonymar -at- hotmail -dot- com)




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