After years (20+) of standing up servers to run systems its little hard to think “Containers” but its so much better. We are falling in love with tooling like the AWS Fargate. Fargate is a new compute engine to run containers without requiring you to deploy or manage a server. In Fargate you specify an image to deploy and the amount of horse power (CPU and memory) you need. Fargate will handle any updating and securing of the underlying Linux OS, Docker daemon, and ECS agent as well as all the infrastructure capacity management and scaling.

One key aspect of a successful software project is estimating the overall project in order to provide a rough estimate and timeline to the customer.  Many of our projects are run as Agile Projects and drill down to specific estimates on each Sprint but many times we need to help our customer before the project starts with an estimate.

Often I will look at a large project and break it down into smaller segments or phases.  Example would be Analysis / Design (we call Design), Build / Construction then Testing followed by deployment.  Once we are contracted to design/build the system the PM/Scrum Master would subdivide the project even further and cycle through these phases many times during he span of a project.

Estimating Software projects can similar to estimating on construction projects.  I happen to have some past experience doing construction estimates  – large scale landscape construction estimates to be specific, large office parks/mega homes ect…  and I draw on tricks I learned years ago.

When estimating a software project look at the foundation first, how many core entities, services, integrations and then build up from there. 

 Full inventory of all UI/Screens would be next along with the complexity of these user interfaces. We know once this goes to the design team this could all changes so we are going with a gut feel first high level pass here.

Now is a good time to look at sizing up security, authorization, authentication, number of roles, encryption ect to make sure enough time is included to do a solid job in these areas.  Our systems must be secure out of the gate and stay secure for many years.  Special attention will be needed if storing any sensitive data like PHI (Personal Health Information), financial data, SSN numbers all will require special care and security. As a rule of thumb if we dont really need to store any of this information in our system then dont > hand that responsibility of to other purpose built services like “Stripe” for credit card processing.

Once all the above information has been capture and analyzed we can size up the amount of Analysis and Design would be required.  We have 3 different designers on staff and they all have different specialties and often all need some time slices on the project. Be sure to allow enough time time design team to talk to stake holders and digest the information so it can be used to improve the over all design outcome.

Toward the end of the estimating project we look at at how much and what kind of testing would be needed to be sure what is deployed can be fully tested resulting in the best possible quality product. We always bring one or more of our full time testing team in to help estimate this level of effort.

Deployment will require time so do not forget to include time to create deployment plans, script deployments, CI Continuous integration and factor in several environments not just projection.

I can help you with better estimating your software project – just reach out to me by email or fill out this form – HERE .