Estimating application development

For more accurate project planning and enhanced communication with your stakeholders, create application development time estimates. When you estimate the duration of your project, you clearly state how much time and effort your development team needs to deliver an application that reflects its specific design and required elements.

Before you begin: Define the main elements of your application:

Create a case type, and then define the case life cycle by adding stages, processes, and steps. See Adding case types to organize work.
Create personas that represent users of your application. See Adding personas to organize users.
Create data objects that visualize the information that your cases require to reach the resolution stage. See Adding data objects to organize data.
Create features that represent usable functionalities in your application. See Creating features.

A project estimate considers various factors, such as the complexity of the application elements, the number of available teams to work on developing the application, and having a configured development environment to build your application. The creation of estimates in Pega Platform is automated. After you provide the required values, the project estimator calculates the expected development duration. To share the estimation results with stakeholders outside Pega Platform, you can export the estimates into an .xlsx file.

In the navigation pane of App Studio, click Overview.
In the Application profile section, click Manage.
In the Application profile workspace, click Estimator.
In the Estimator section, in the Release list, select the release for which you want to calculate the estimate.
For example: Create a collective estimate for all defined releases by selecting All.
In the Delivery list, select the implementation method that your development team uses.
For example: Select Scrum/Agile.

Non-Agile methodologies increase the estimated effort and duration by 20%.
In the Number of teams field, specify how many teams can work on the project.
In the Scrum maturity list, select a value that describes the customer's experience with scrum projects.
Medium maturity increases the estimated effort and duration by 7.5%, and low maturity by 15%.
In the Staffing model list, select a value that indicates the level of cooperation between the customer and Pega.
In the co-production model, it is assumed that a business architect and two system architects from the customer side join each development team.
In the Environment list, select the environment on which you want to deploy the application.
Creating a new on-premises environment elongates the estimated effort and duration by 10%.
In the Organization complexity list, select an option that indicates how many levels and regulations your organization has.
Organizations with high complexity comply with external regulations and additional validation requirements, such as government organizations and those in the financial, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries.
A high complexity level increases the estimated effort and duration by 20%.
In the Data import effort list, select an option that describes the complexity level of the effort required to migrate data from the legacy system to the new Pega system.
A high complexity level increases the estimated effort and duration by 30%, medium by 20%, and low by 10%.
Click Calculate estimate.
Result: The estimator calculates the expected development duration in hours and weeks, with a division between Pega and customer hours. The estimator also includes detailed information about the number and complexity of the items in your application, such as case types, personas, data objects, and features.
Optional: To import the estimate to an .xlsx file, in the Application overview workspace header, click Actions > Export estimate as .xlsx file.
Result: App Studio automatically saves the .xlsx file to your machine.