All the trappings of sizing a software project.

Recently I’ve been helping scope a project to develop a new Product. In an Agile world big design up front may be frowned-upon, but commercial reality requires some idea of costs from the outset. You need to plan, to size up the job. You must somehow answer the question: What will the software for this Product look like?

I don’t mean “What does the UI look like?” any more than I mean “Will it have a funky yellow chassis?” or even “What will source tree look like ?".

I’m talking about something less easy to visualise:

  • what will the main components be?
  • how do they connect?
  • how big are they?