Software development Strategies.

PLANNING POKER (29th August 2016)

Is a type of software development strategy, focus on agile methodology in which team members try to determine the difficulty and therefore time needed to develop each part of the project solution.

The defining characteristic of Planning Poker is the use of poker cards with numbers or special cards like a coffee break and unknown values, each team member pick the value of difficulty they think represents the task's difficulty. A moderator is required.

The lowest and higher value discuss the reason why they choose their estimated values.

Repeat the estimation process until a consensus is reached. The developer who was likely to own the deliverable has a large portion of the "consensus vote", although the Moderator can negotiate the consensus.

Fuzzy Logic (1st September 2016)

First we have to understand the meaning of the word FUZZY, is when something is not clearly defined whenever there aren't clear cut boundries between the possibilities of a problem. For example, how do we know when a project is large ? it seems weird to arbitrarily define that after a certain number of lines of code a problem goes from being small to being large, this is why we use fuzzy sets, so these boundries aren't as black or white.

Fuzzy Logic Method.

Step 1. Break down the sizes of all your organization's previously developed products into size categories.

• Based on lines of code
• Smallest program had 173 LOC
• Largest 10,341

• Divide this range intuitive equal sets on a logarithmic scale
• Take the logarithm base 10
• Smallest 173 giving 2.238
• Largest and 10,341, giving 4.014
• To get five categories, divide the difference by 4
• 4.014-2.238 = 1.776/4 = 0,444.
• This is the logarithmic increment between each category
• 2.238, 2.682, 3.126, 3.57, 4.014
• 173,  481,  1,338,  3,719,  10,341

• Finally you will judge in which category your project most closely resembles.

Step 2. With more experience, you could gross size ranges into more detailed categories.

Step 3. Convert values to logarithms (log 10) of the ranges.

Example of an estimation of a project's size using fuzzy logic sets.