Friday, January 30, 2009

Estimating with Use Case Points - FREE template

Being lazy, I was looking for a free, read-made, comprehensive and easy-to-use spreadsheet template for estimating project effort with use case points. I needed it for one of my current projects, in which we are writing 200+ use cases (sic!, see my remark below), and prepare a project proposal for senior management. 
I came across Scott Selhorst's material on Use Case Point Estimation. Very useful!
Check out:

The template can also be googled and found at modernAnalyst, another useful source of information for business analysts and such folk.

Note on the large number of use cases: I personally think they are no real use cases. It's quite close to a functional decomposition done in use case form. I expect the system to arrive at about 8000 Function Points, but estimates range from 1.000 to 15.000 as of now :-)
 

2 comments:

ron phillips said...

Use case point estimating is really powerful and surprisingly accurate - especially when the project results are "fed back" into the parametric model.

Another great reason to adopt use cases in your requirements!

Ron Phillips
www.casecomplete.com

anilkuppa said...

Well said Ron in short!
ofcourse its a very powerful tool when "fed back" into a parametric model. One easy way to estimate using use case points is a template available for download at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/11361962/UseCase-Estimation-Template