Objectively Determining Percentage Complete

Do your programmers go from 0% to 80% complete on their coding tasks, then stay at 80% for weeks or months?  Do your testers rate themselves 75% done on test case creation, but stay at that same percentage completion for extended periods of time?  Do your system administrators take longer than expected to merge code to your quality assurance servers?

If you answered YES to any of these items, it may be time to objectively determine percentage complete of tasks.  Accurately reporting of task progress has many advantages, here are a couple of benefits:

• Risk Management - By knowing the true progress towards tasks, your team can better manage risk and aid team members that have slipping tasks.

• Reduced costs -  By addressing slipping tasks earlier, you can reduce cost overruns by  ensuring each team member is fully utilized during each phase of the software life cycle.

The key to accurately predicting percentage complete is to objectively define what composes each percentage complete.  Below are some examples of objectively defining percentage complete for various tasks within the software life cycle.  These are examples to guide you, your objective levels may be different, use these as a starting point of discussion with your team.

Coding Tasks

Testing Tasks

Code Merge Tasks