Identifying Standard Testing Time for Estimation Improvement in IT Project Management

The key interesting of executing the project to be success in the committed scope, time, cost and quality is the ability of estimating the required efforts and resources to be used in the project which potentially link to the delay and definitely cause to risk of loss in business opportunity, business reputation and financial impacts. There are several methodologies, have been proposed for the improvement but it is still uncertainty or unclear in the adoption of estimation guideline. Thus, this research is to propose more clearer and easier method to improve the mission of executing for project by introducing an adoption of Lean Six-Sigma methodology for the improvement of estimation for IT project. The outcome of this research is expected to provide the guideline of calculation method in specific organization in order to improve the efforts estimation for testing execution.

I. Introduction

In the general of Project Management methodology, one of the key challenges of project delay is the stage of testing or inspection phase which mostly the actual time spending is greater than plan and potentially required more costs and resources. Same with Information Technology (IT) projects, the ability of efforts estimation of testing [1] is also the key challenge which project team may not be able to exercise using any standard guideline. But it usually plans by using delivery target launch schedule working backward or giving the simple bulk estimation such as 1–2 months for SIT and 1–2 months for UAT without any linkage to the number of business functions or number of required test cases or duration of potential fix time. All these are considered as the critical success factor of the project which this research has focus on. The key interesting of this research is to measure the time spending of the testing activities for end-to-end testing process of project management in software development which expected to be able to identify the potential standard time of testing for better estimation in future project.