Re: Page Count Estimates

[Sue Ellen Adkins <sea -at- NETCOM -dot- COM>]

Ron Miller quoted  TLARSEN -at- NOVELL -dot- COM (Tamara Larsen) and added his comments:

> >JoAnn Hackos, in "Managing Your Documentation Projects" (p 170) gives
> >the following estimates:
> >
> >User guide                                      5 hours per page
> >Software Applications Reference Manual          4 hours per page
> >Hardware Maintenance and Troubleshooting Man.   8 hours per page

> If I took 5 hours to write a page of documentation, my jobs would
> never get done. That translates into 12.5 weeks of development
> working 40 hours per week. In my experience that should be cut in
> half. Nobody I've ever worked for has given me this kind of lead time--
> not that I wouldn't love to have it.
> It just has never happened.

One variable that JoAnn Hackos doesn't mention is the size of the page.  Most
government proposals require 8.5 x 11" pages with 1" margins, leaving a 6.5 x
9" text block or 58.5 square inches of text.  The text block of the Hackos
book is 5.25 x 7.5" or 39.4 square inches of text.  A software manual I
checked has a text block of 4 x 5.25" or 21 square inches of text.  So, your
estimate may be equivalent to the 5 hours per page.

On small pages, screen shots can occupy 30-50% of a page.  If I don't collect
them, I don't include them in my estimate of the number of pages I have to
write.  By taking the time to make a detailed estimate of the task and
documenting any assumptions I make, I establish a base I can use to identify
where my estimate was wrong (and hopefully, why).  Did it take me longer
because the number of pages grew by 30%?  Was there a major change in the
software spec late in the development cycle?

My experience working on proposals has taught me that the number of hours
required to write a proposal will expand to fill the number of hours available
for writing. It's difficult for me to stop trying to make it just a little bit
better.

Sue Ellen Adkins
sea -at- netcom -dot- com