Patent ID: 6550053
Filing Date: 2003-04-15
Classification: G06Q

Abstract:
A method of estimating the time a particular designer or any one of a group of designers will take to realise a new design using an object-oriented methodology, including the step of determining for the particular designer or group of designers the appropriate version of a formula which links the time estimate and the numbers of predeterminated types of object-oriented elements present in a design, each element type having a respective multiplier for the particular designer or group of designers associated with it, wherein values for the respective multipliers are calculated from the numbers of the object-oriented elements of each type that the particular designer or group of designers employed in a plurality of previous designs and the actual realisation times for those designs, and including the steps of inserting the numbers of each of the types of the object-oriented elements present in the new design in the appropriate version of the formula and evaluating the formula, thereby obtaining the time estimate.