Techniques for estimating costs
Estimating testing costs can be facilitated with two models: (1) expert judgment or (2) historical information. With expert judgment, a project member who is experienced with testing activities can estimate the resources and hours needed to conduct a testing task such as time needed to design a test case that involves five transaction codes, or total time needed to execute an end-to-end scenario. A person with expert judgment estimating testing costs may rely on established industry guidelines and benchmarks, software methodologies, or own hands-on experience. For instance, IBM’s Ascendant SAP methodology shows that documenting test results for test cases with an average complexity level may take as long as 30 minutes per person.
On the other hand, historical information provides a repository of information for the number of time units needed by each projectspecific resource to conduct a testing task. For instance, historical information may show that a given project member takes on average two business days to resolve a defect with a severity level of one, or may also show that test cases for a particular business area (i.e., warehouse management) take on average five hours to execute per resource. Alternatively, for companies relying on earned value calculations, historical data may show that the testing costs for a previous testing phase required 5,000 person-hours at a total cost of $2 million, which can serve as a basis of estimate for planning testing costs.
Both historical and expert judgment models may not take into account other testing costs that facilitate and support testing activities. The acquisition, purchasing, and maintenance costs of software test tools and hardware resources may not be captured correctly with both the historical and expert judgment models. This makes it imperative that, independent of the technique used for estimating testing costs, the cost estimating technique includes labor costs for hourly rates, hardware costs, software costs, number of labor hours needed, traveling costs for remote participants traveling to conduct testing tasks, and the costs from an outsourcing agreement if one exists.
Aggregating and decomposing all testing costs allows the test manager to create a more accurate budget for all testing activities. [Testing SAP R/3, Jose Fajardo, Elfriede Dustin 2007]
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