estimating of testing effort as a percentage of de

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Closed 7 years ago.

Does anyone use a rule of thumb basis to estimate the effort required for testing as a percentage of the effort required for development? And if so what percentage do you use?

Answer 1

From my experience, 25% effort is spent on Analysis; 50% for Design, Development and Unit Test; remaining 25% for testing. Most projects will fit within a +/-10% variance of this rule of thumb depending on the nature of the project, knowledge of resources, quality of inputs & outputs, etc. One can add a project management overhead within these percentages or as an overhead on top within a 10-15% range.

Answer 2

Judge by yesterday's weather. How long did it take last time? Are you trending longer or shorter? Each shop is different.

Most agile shops need a lot less time, have drastically fewer defects, and quicker time to resolve them because of TDD. Even so, most agile shops have some measurable time spent with testing/QC.

If this is the first test run for this application, then the answer is "lets see" followed by an attempt. It depends on how quick you can get questions answered, - how testable it is, - how many features/functions - how many defects are discovered, - how quickly issues are resolved, - how many times the code cycles through testing, and - how many times testing is blocked by bugs. There is no way to tell. You could call it 50% or 175% or more, and not be wrong. Why not make a rough guess and multiply by Pi? It won't be much worse than any other answer you can make up.

You should (must) know how long it takes now and whether it's getting faster or slower, and whether the coverage is increasing or decreasing. With those three bits of information, you should be able to guess quite well.

Answer 3

When you speak of tests, you could mean waterfall or agile test development. In an agile environment, developers should spend 50% of their time developing and maintaining tests.

But that 50% extra will save you time when the re-factoring and manual verification time comes.

Answer 4

Gartner in Oct 2006 states that testing typically consumes between 10% and 35% of work on a system integration project. I assume that it applies to the waterfall method. This is quite a wide range - but there are many dependencies on the amount of customisations to a standard product and the number of systems to be integrated.