[kplato] definitions of effort and risk

[Jim Sabatke]

For the purposes of this project:

Effort is the amount of actual time (hours, weeks, minutes...) that a 
given task requires for completion.

Risk, I'll have to think about that one as there are so many kinds of 
risk in a project.  You CAN look at it as a quantifiable variance on effort.

Jim

John D Lamb wrote:

>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
>>
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-- 
Jim Sabatke
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http://www.execpc.com/~jsabatke

"People tell me that I'm fading fast, that I can't last the whole night through" Janis Ian