The process of estimating your app development costs is essential for the overall success of your project. First of all, it helps answer one of the most important questions all clients ask: “How much time will it take to develop my app?”
What’s more, software estimation can go a long way towards helping you figure out how much of your hard-earned dollars you’re going to spend on your project.
- One of the most effective methods of estimating the ballpark figure required to develop a successful app (or any other type of software) is to use an online app cost estimator.
App developers, in their turn, employ various software estimation techniques to define the optimal number of coders and engineers needed to complete the project.
Also, software estimation is an important stage during which strong planning metrics are developed and calculated.
Read Further to Know How to Organize the Software Project Estimation Process.
1. Assess the Level of Complexity
Before you get down to developing your application, you should decide for yourself what functionalities you want your future project to possess.
This will give you the vision of the overall complexity of your project and help determine your development team capacity, as well as evaluate the risks and problems that are liable to happen during the development process.
To reduce these risks to a minimum, you want to allow for possible time delays. You would be well advised to add a risk buffer of about 20% of your previously estimated development time.
2. Factor in Time Eaters
The app development process isn’t all smooth and unhindered.
As we’ve noted earlier, there may arise unexpected issues and hitches requiring postponing the implementation of certain features or making changes to the initial development plan.
But apart from addressing the urgent issues, you’ll need to spend your precious time discussing some development aspects with your project managers, conducting research, double-checking written code, etc.
All these small yet time-consuming tasks are called time eaters because of their tendency to distract you from your primary development tasks.
With this in mind, you want to add at least 20% of your app development time to cover possible time eaters and keep your project on track.
3. Predict Team Capacity
Once you’ve defined the optimal number of developers that will be working on the project at hand, you’ll need to assign tasks and duties to team members.
It’s a good idea to create a table where you’ll outline your developers’ roles and show the calculated amount of time required for the completion of tasks at hand.
4. Work With Users’ Stories
Don’t underestimate the role of user stories in the successful development of your app. User stories give the development team a vision of how a certain feature should work and look like.
Once you’re done with user stories, proceed to break each story down into a series of tasks, each one having an estimate of story points.
Story points are essential metrics that allow estimating the overall effort your team member will need to exercise to implement this or that user story.
To make this process more enjoyable and effective, use Scrum poker techniques. They can go a long way in determining the tentative scale of your development objectives.
5. Calculate the Project Duration
Your final and most important step involves estimating your app development time as accurately as possible.
At this point, you should combine all the knowledge you’ve gained and break down the entire project into smaller, more manageable parts, which are called sprints.
If you use the Sprint technique wisely, you can help your agile team accelerate the process of developing high-quality software and ensure its on-time delivery.
This all affords your team more flexibility and provides your developers with the tools necessary to adapt to changes quickly and painlessly.