Experiences in Accurately Estimating Electronic Forms Conversion Services with a Spiral Estimate Process

Electronic forms (eforms) are a key component in the information system for today's enterprises. The growing adoption of eforms generates a great demand for eforms services. These services are batch services, as they do not produce only one or two software systems, but usually produce hundreds or even thousands of eforms, which are different from each other. Compared with other software services, the period of an eforms service is very short, usually a few weeks. In addition, they share a critical risk with other software service, that is, the delay of the delivery date due to under-estimate. Therefore, the success of eforms services largely depends on the service estimate. Obviously, accuracy is the major challenge. The authors of this paper are working on eforms services and have experience on accurately estimating eforms services at hour level before the service starts. In this paper, the entire estimate process is described, which consists of 3 pre-service phases and 1 post-service phase. The estimate only covers eforms development circle. Eforms integration with legacy system is out of the scope of this paper. During our previous service projects, we developed a couple of simple, but effective tools to help improve the accuracy of estimate for eforms services. The tools are also described in the paper.