Software projects are notorious for scope crepe, schedule slippage beyond control and excessive cost escalation and very high uncertainty through the project completion. The success of any software project largely depends on effective estimation of project effort, time, and cost. The programmers are overenthusiastic and overoptimistic about commitmments which seldom gets materialized for fome reason or the other. Poor definition or misunderstanding of the project's requirements, absence of its proper documentation and common agreements, poor definition or absence of processes in work place, the psychological need of the programmer for freedom from the process constraints all add to the misery of the project's objectives continuosly getting upset.

Software cost estimation is first and foremost about getting the right attitude -- not just for the software developers but for senior management too. There are software estimation methods, tools, and techniques many of which have been around for more than two decades. The problem, though, has been threefold:

The methods were often theoretic or academic and did not work well in the real world.
They needed to be tailored to the specific reality of each organization, and
The methods were in any case largely ignored in favor of gut feeling techniques.

The objective of our one day workshop on software Estimation is to introduce some of he most practical ways of estimating the size, cost and schedule is software development projects.