The Estimator tool

Application development requires multiple team members, such as developers and business stakeholders, to work together and communicate effectively. Careful planning and accurate estimations are important to ensure that the project is delivered on time and within the expected budget. You can use the Estimator tool to estimate the effort required to develop one or more releases of the application in an intuitive and automated way.

Estimate application resources

In App Studio, provide information about your planned application, such as the implementation methodology, the number and complexity of features that you want to implement, and the number of scrum teams involved. The project estimator automatically calculates the predicted project duration.

To prepare an estimate, you use the Estimator tool to specify details about your organization and implementation team (for example, whether you plan to use an existing development environment or deploy your application on Pega Cloud®). The Estimator tool returns the result in weeks and hours with a division between Pega developer hours and customer hours so that you can conveniently plan the work. The Estimator tool also includes detailed information about the number and complexity of the items in your application, such as Case Types, Personas, data objects, and features. You can prepare estimations for a selected release of your application or consider all the planned releases to get a holistic view of your project development.

In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the configuration options for the Estimator tool:

  • Release

    Select a specific release (MLP1, MLP2, MLPn, Future, Unplanned, All, or custom) to view the estimate for that release.

  • Delivery

    Select the implementation method that your development team uses: Scrum/Agile or Waterfall/Other. 

  • Number of teams

    Enter the number of scrum teams that are working on the project. A typical scrum team consists of:

    • One Business Architect.

    • One Lead System Architect.

    • Three System Architects.

    • Two testers from the client.

    • One part-time UX designer.

    You can reduce the development duration with more teams. For example, two teams may take half as long as one team to develop an application. 

  • Scrum maturity

    For Scrum/Agile projects, you rate the familiarity of your team members with Scrum. Select a value that describes the team experience with the estimated effort for the scrum project.

    For example, Medium maturity increases the estimated effort and duration by 7.5 percent, while Low maturity increases the estimated effort and duration by 15 percent.

    Note: Scrum maturity is only an option for the Scrum/Agile delivery method.

  • Staffing model

    Select a staffing model that indicates the level of cooperation between the client and Pega. If you use the Pega co-production model, the consultants provided by Pega or a Pega partner are supplemented with resources from the client.

    Co-production immerses client resources in Pega application development during the learning process, helping clients become proficient at building Pega applications more quickly.

  • Environment

    Select the environment in which you want to deploy the application.

    For example, a new on-premise environment increases the estimated effort and duration by 10 percent. 

  • Organization complexity

    Select an option that indicates how many levels and regulations your organization has. Organizations with high complexity typically must comply with external regulations and additional validation requirements.

    For example, government organizations and those in the financial, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries often have a high organizational complexity because of the large bureaucratic structures and significant oversight required. 

  • Data import effort

    Select the required effort to migrate data from a legacy system to a new Pega application:

    • None

    • Low increases the estimated effort and duration by 10 percent.

    • Medium increases the estimated effort and duration by 20 percent.

    • High increases the estimated effort and duration by 30 percent.

After you estimate your work, you can share the calculations outside of Pega Platform by exporting the results to an XLSX file. For example, you might want to discuss the estimations with your stakeholders to bring more transparency and accuracy to the project planning.

 

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Define core application elements

Before you use the Estimator tool, define the following main structural elements of your application: 

  • Create Case Types, and then define the Case Life Cycles by adding Stages, Processes, and Steps.

  • Create Personas that represent users of your application.

  • Create data objects that visualize the information that your Cases require to reach the Resolution Stage.

  • Create features that represent usable functionalities in your application.

After you define the core elements, you assign the Channels and data objects to a release to establish a rough estimate of the work planned for each release. By default, Pega Platform provides four default releases: 

  • MLP 1

  • MLP 2

  • MLP n

  • Future

The Application Profile also provides an Unplanned release option, which incorporates elements that do not have a release explicitly defined.

Personas are associated with one or more Channels that identify how the individuals interact with the application. The project planning team assigns the Channels to a release, which helps the development team visualize the means of communication to implement. For example, in an employee onboarding application, you can associate HR with a web Channel in the MLP 1 release and a mobile Channel in the MLP 2 release.

For data objects, each data interface, which defines where the data comes from or where it is persisted is assigned to a release. For example, in a Roadside Service application, the service provider's address might reside in Pega Platform as the system of record in the MLP 1 release and as an external system of record in the subsequent MLP 2 release. 

The complexity of these implementations establishes rough estimates of the work planned for each release. 

Note: To build a more complex project roadmap, you can also add custom releases from the Actions menu in the upper-right corner of the Application Profile landing page.