Information Technology and the NHS Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Information Technology and the NHS - Case Study Example The bridging of these two domains has created new challenges in this field. Due of competitive pressures, Internet and intranet business sites are often given high priority, with senior management imposing unrealistic deadlines. Completion time may be based on nothing more formal than wishful thinking, yet, because the site deployment is integrated with many other aspects of business operations, schedule slips can have dire financial consequences. Before we explore how to plan in Internet time, however, let's review the basics of heuristic and parametric estimating. It is a well-known fact that effective project estimation is one of the major challenges in software development. Many software developers and managers acknowledge the fact that proper planning is not possible without proper estimation of the project. Under estimating a project leads to under-staffing it which in turn leads to under-scooping the quality assurance effort and in turn setting too short a schedule ultimate resulting in missing of deadlines. The software industry, as a whole has found to be not estimating projects really well. A software estimation model defines characteristics whose values it needs and the ways these values are used to compute the effort. An estimation model cannot work in vacuum- it needs inputs to need the values of the output. At the start of the project, when the details of the estimates are itself not known, the estimation model will require the values of the characteristics that can be measured at any stage. Top down estimation approach Expert judgment is still the dominant technique in practice today for estimation of software project size and effort. The function points can be counted using the standard function point counting rules. In addition to the size estimate the top-down approach requires the estimation of productivity and the efficiency. The basic approach is to start with the productivity levels of standard projects or use the productivity statistics. The productivity estimate is then used to calculate the overall effort estimate. To sum it up, the top-down estimation requires Get the estimate of the total size of the software in terms of the function points. Using the productivity level from the project baseline, fix the productivity levels for the project. Obtain the overall effort estimates from the size and the time estimates. Refine the estimates taking the project specific factors into consideration. The size of the project is required to be known in order to determine the effort estimate of the project. But the size of the project cannot be known at the time when the project is being conceived and the project is in the initial phases. Hence, there must be some initial size estimate depending on the resources at hand at that moment in order to realize the effort estimate. A common approach is to use a simple equation for the effort estima