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:
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.
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