Making estimations fast and fun.
Estimagility is a tool for everyone using agile software development techniques for building a library of reference stories. Save your user stories together with all the factors you need use these as basis for all future estimations.
In Estimagility you can:
* Keep and maintain your reference user stories, epics, tasks, projects with all their complexity factors.
* Estimate by comparing complexity explicitly via sliders. fast, reliable, reproducible. No more error prone tempting to add up time.
* Particular useful for big complex stories
* Maintain a list of complexity factors, for whatever you need. coding, testing, risk, conceptualizing, UI design, ...
* Weigh your complexity factors relative to each other. E.g., you can configure that "coding" weighs 5 times as much in complexity as "testing".
* Make estimations fast and fun!
* This version is limited to 5 user stories. When you add a 6th user story, you can buy unlimited user stories via an In App purchase.
Estimating Complexity rather than Time has become a well-known and proven technique in agile software development. The idea behind it is to compare the complexity of a new project or task with the complexity of something that has already been done.
Lets say we want to estimate how much work does it take to brew a fresh cup of espresso with our new espresso machine. Traditionally, we would identify tasks (switch on the coffee machine, wait for the coffee machine to heat up, measure coffee, etc.) and then estimate the time each task takes. Clearly, estimating even such a simple task in this fashion is cumbersome and time-consuming.
Now imagine using this to estimate how much it would cost to build a new "website".
But there is a different way.
You know that making espresso is not as difficult as making Turkish coffee, but more difficult than making filter coffee. That allows you to say that making espresso is slightly more complex than filter-coffee making. Now, say you give filter-coffee making a complexity of 4 and Turkish coffee making a complexity of 7, then you come to the conclusion that espresso coffee making comes to a complexity of 5. And by a simple calculation you can now calculate the time you would need when making espresso only based on your reference work, not on adding up tasks.
And estimating Irish coffee making is now a matter of seconds for you!
In software development the process is essentially the same.
When you are planning your new website and you need quick estimation in order to define your business case or prioritize projects, you dont want to spend too much time figuring out every little task and adding up time. You want a quick, but also a reliable estimate based on experience and relevant factors.
So you think about the websites you previously built. How difficult was it to build them? How difficult was the testing? Did you have to write a lot of code? Did you have to deal with a cumbersome legacy application that made integration difficult?
Estimagility allows you to use this technique, but in a direct and straightforward way.
Instead of juggling a checklist of factors, Estimagility maintains for you a transparent checklist of complexity factors, so that you dont have to memorize that "building the register screen" was quite complex due to the huge amount of testing involved. So next time you have to make an estimation, you can base it on the relevant and known factors and determine that "building the login screen" is relatively simple, not because it needs less programming, but because testing of it is much easier.
This is not only about software development. You can use this tool for everything you need to estimate and plan. So why shouldnt you?