UOW for SW projects

UOW for SW Projects

It is critical to decide applicable UOW’s for specific SW projects. UOW can be defined as a logical chunk of work which can be done by independent teams or individual developers. The candidates UOW for SW are use cases, user stories, features, bug fixing, test cases etc. Every team should discuss and come to an agreement on relevant UOW’s. Once, there is an agreement of UOW’s to be used, all team member should be trained on agreed UOW. For example, if a team decides use stories as UOW, every member of the team should be trained on what user stories are, how they should be written and how they should be interpreted. Selected UOW’s should be used as basis for managing SW projects throughout their life cycle. UOW should be classified from different perspective – customer, volume, complexity. From customer perspective, UOW can be classified into vital, desirable and essential etc. UOW from Volume and complexity perspective can be classified into High, Medium and Low. Once this is done, effort estimation can done with relative ease. Estimation is by far the most difficult exercise in SW development. If a team can work on certain specific UOW’s and practice evidence based scheduling, it can deliver SW on time. Evidence based scheduling means that making initial estimate for a particular UOW and then comparing it with actuall effort. Over time, team can develop a data base of estimated and actual effort and use this to substantially improve its capability to deliver SW on time.