I have found that most small mapbasic projects are fairly easy to plan and estimate, but that the larger ones are sometimes a *lot* more difficult. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the lack of software management tools available for mapbasic, and how much of this is just the usual problems endemic in software planning, but I need to find some better techniques or tools. Sometimes I find that the first hurdle is finding out what the client really wants. The problem is that they often don't know what's possible, or how to describe what they only vaguely have in mind. When that happens, your estimate and schedule is already in danger. Other times I under-estimate the true complexity of the user interface, and a simple dialog box gets up off the slab and turns into a lurching, moaning, multi-page monster. For example, user-defined picklists can be a danger signal; they're not a trivial edit control. Dialogs that link data from more than one table also can get complicated, too. How do you estimate the depth of these pitfalls (short of diving in headfirst and counting the seconds until impact)? So does anyone have any tips, procedures, checklists, notation techniques, reference sources, or whatever that they have found to make the software planning, estimation and tracking tasks a little easier? If you have any hints that you know work well, I'd love to hear from you. I'll summarize, but if you want anonymity, I'll respect that too. I'm sort of fed up with winging it (even though most people tell me that's basically what they do too.) TIA, - Bill Thoen ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
