ECE Calendar

Abstract:
It’s a well-known fact in the software industry that correctly predicting costs and durations of real-life software projects is very hard. Even experienced developers can routinely underestimate the costs of typical software projects by dramatic margins. Overly optimistic estimates are common to many types of engineering projects. In this seminar, we’ll chat about the reasons for why some projects (and especially software projects) are so hard to estimate and why it is important to learn to do it better. We’ll cover some common errors and misconceptions involved in estimating software projects and talk about some of the tools and techniques used in the industry to improve these predictions.

Biography:
Alex wrote his first computer software at the age of 14 and has been involved in software development ever since. His first paid software job was building a large image database of sky objects at the University of Minnesota. For the past 13 years, Alex has been a developer and manager of developers on the Microsoft Office Project team. His team is responsible for the development work on the Microsoft Project client, server scheduling, and time management features.

Alex holds six patents in areas related to scheduling algorithms, work model visualization, and building enterprise work management systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota.

Pizza and pop will be served following the presentation!