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dimensionavFlag for Mexico

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How to calculate times for developing software?

HI

We have been developing pieces of code for small projects and everything went good until we started with large projects, we noticed that our way of calculating the developing time is not working at all, so we would like to implement a new strategy based on your suggestions and comments.

Thanks!
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crystal (strive4peace) - Microsoft MVP, Access

multiply the time you think it will take by 4

With the database applications I build, I always have trouble estimating, with any accuracy, how long a project will take until the structure is known ... and that is often about 30% of the time for work.  With a large project, phase it out and estimate it a phase at a time.  

I connect and team-develop with clients.   This is especially helpful when the project is being designed to get better business intelligence and my contact also sees the effort.    Once the data structure and relationships are known, estimating is done on small pieces at a time is they must have a fixed number.  By then, they have seen how I work and are often happy with an hourly rate.

what kind of software projects are being developed?
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ASKER

crystal:
Maybe we should start from scratch and "rethink" a new way of estimate time, any suggestion about it will be helpful. Please think as If we were amateurs on this.
We are now in a project of an ERP based on cloud, the technology involved is PHP and PostgreSQL DB.
Crystal, I forgot to mention that I would like to know if the strategy could be the same for internal or externals (freelancers) employees.
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crystal (strive4peace) - Microsoft MVP, Access

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Agree whole-heartedly that it is hard to estimate the efforts for a new project .  Everyone has different procedures so if you have already done something similar, there will still be many differences.
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