If you are using Understand 2.0 I encourage you to update with each release. It is a young version and has a number of bug fixes and improvements introduced each week.
In particular, if you are a Unix user you will want to at least update to B448 released today. It has a fix in it for the problem of lost application settings (fonts, font sizes, window locations, etc…) on systems that have daily or more frequent clearing of their /tmp directories.
Thanks,
Ken N.
Maintenance Estimation
Has your boss ever dropped by and asked “How hard would it be to add X functionality”, or “What’s involved in fixing that bug in Y”? Some call this activity “Software Estimation”, others “Change Scoping”, and still others “SWAG” (sophisticated wild assed guessing). Since we are focused on tools for software maintenance, we call it “Maintenance Estimation”.
Understand has been used to assist in Maintenance Estimation since we first offered it. This traditionally involved collecting metrics of the code involved, identifying and comprehending dependencies (call tree usually), and mashing it all together into an informed estimate. Enough customers told us of how they used Understand in that role that we decided that 2.0 should have features directly supporting it.
And thus the new “Estimate” menu was born. “Estimate” helps engineers prepare, measure and assess plans for software modifications and enhancements. It is focused on supporting scoping of changes to existing code. It supports specifying new code to be hooked into existing code.
The “Estimate” menu inside Understand 2.0 offers personal Maintenance Estimation by a single engineer. A tool we will release later this year, tenatively called “Impact”, permits combined multi-user estimation that can integrate plans and estimates from multiple engineers planning maintenance on the same body of source code.
Build 447 will contain the first public release of the “Estimate” feature of 2.0. It is brand new and we release it more for comments/suggestions than for you to do large amounts of estimating work with. We wanted to get some early feedback so we could have time to respond to it as we finalize other features in the tool.
So please give it a try. I’ll go over the concepts below the fold. Your feedback is very welcome.
