When climbing a mountain, one of the most foolish things we could ever do is to have absolutely no idea how high it is and how far to climb. A mountain twice or three times higher, does not automatically mean it will take two or three times longer, there are other factors that could slow us down. There could be ice or snow, some dangerous weather conditions; you may need to take additional equipment. You may also need to stay a few nights or in the case of Mt Everest take a team of Sherpas to help you.
Developing a web based software or programming can also be a bit of a mountain. Unless you have developed something similar, though it can be difficult estimating the amount of time required completing a project, and that risk needs to be taken into effect. We don’t have the luxury of benchmark levels like mountaineers, which tell us how far to go. However there are practical steps that can be taken to prevent jobs from ballooning out into two or three times the size.
One is include a system of change requests, which can either be actioned by the client or developer. Any change is either a bug fix or enhancement, which are chargeable. Another method I found very useful was preparing all the different forms in a rough form (no formatting or validation) and agreeing on these before going further.
There is a common myth that a software project that is twice as big will take twice as long to complete. Unfortunately it takes much longer than that. The amount of time taken to complete a job three times bigger is even far greater; the time taken grows exponentially.
Clients need be made aware of this when developing projects, as most will be completely unaware of this trap.
Paul Roberts
I run a software development company specialising in E-Commerce, Search Engine Optimization, and Print Estimation software at http://www.robodesignsolutions.com.
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