[kplato] definitions of effort and risk

[John D Lamb]

Can anyone give precise definitions of

(a) effort? (b) risk?

just so that I'm sure we all mean the same thing.

There are other areas that have similar problems with estimation -
visual interactive simulation is one of them - and there are reasonable
ways of handling them. I suggest a flexible approach. Allow the user to
enter uncertainty in any reasonable way, starting with fixed values,
going through optimistic and pessimistic values and ending with a fully
specified statistical distribution (probably not in the first few
versions). As long as each task can return values like expected
duration, optimistic duration, pessimistic duration, the precise way
these are calculated can be defined polymorphically.

JDL

bilbo wrote:
> 
> On 21 Jun 2001, at 12:01, Jim Sabatke wrote:
> 
> In sw projects I'm used to quoting estimates for tasks as, for
> example, 30 mandays +/- 5days. Does this translate easily into
> risk or is risk to be handled separately, and if so should we be
> including uncertainty? It could be required to enter the base
> estimate plus the positive uncertainty (35 days from above) but this
> smacks of imposing an approach and reducing flexibility.
> Is it only (some) software projects that work this way - surely other
> disciplines have similar problems with estimation?
> 
> regards,
>         Bill