When a project goes over schedule, costs too much money, or doesn’t deliver the desired functionality, business leaders may wonder what could have been done differently. Ask a professional estimator. Often, these are the people holding the crystal ball - those charged with planning and assessing the project before it even gets off the ground. We recently polled our own seasoned estimation experts at QSM to find out their thoughts.

In this white paper, Kate Armel explains where general purpose estimation tools can help you quickly create and revise estimates, establish repeatable estimation processes, sanity check plans against proven performance, and mitigate known – and hidden - Cloud migration risks.

In order to use a sizing unit other than SLOC in the SLIM tools, you must assign a gearing factor.  For function points, gearing factors are discussed here. In this article, QSM's Andy Berner addresses ways of choosing a gearing factor for story points.

Part of QSM's Agile Round Table article series, the fourth article focuses on determining size in a consistent enough manner across multiple products, projects, and agile teams so that you have good historical data on which to base an estimate. It also shows how to apply these techniques with the SLIM Suite of products.

In this article for IFPUG's Metric Views, Carol Dekkers and Joe Madden suggest a new way to repurpose function points to achieve software project estimating successes today.