Tier wise requirement estimation model

BANGALORE, INDIA: Automatic Data Processing, Inc., with nearly $9 billion in revenues and approximately 585,000 clients, is one of the world's largest providers of business outsourcing solutions.

ADP Private Limited, India (CMMi 5) provides a complete range of application development, technical support and back office operations (both voice and non-voice processes) to both the Strategic Business Units of ADP Inc.

Like most leading software development organizations, “Estimation”, “Tracking” & “Quantitative Management” are critical processes to ensure high quality & within budget delivery of work products.

Multiple iterations of employing & evaluating various Estimation Models proved inconclusive towards arriving at a Common Repeatable technique across any cross-section within the Organization that would meet the needs of “Product” Development & Maintenance. Additional challenges were faced during Benchmarking and establishing Process Performance Models at the Organization level because of lack of common Size measure.

Based on some research and trial and error modeling with couple of real project instances, we created an estimation model, “Tier Wise Requirement Estimation” based on Project Management best practices and basic estimation principles. The model works excellently (Effort Variance between 4 percent - 9percent) for any “Product” Development & Maintenance across technologies (open systems: - J2EE, Microsoft etc)

The paper describes the TWR Estimation Model, its technique, deployment strategy and benefits.