The Estimator tool

You can estimate the development effort of one or more releases of your application in an intuitive and automated way. In App Studio, provide information about your planned application, such as the implementation methodology, the number and complexity of features that you want to implement, and how many scrum teams are involved. The project estimator automatically calculates the predicted project duration.

To prepare an estimate, you use the Estimator tool to specify details about your organization and implementation team (for example, whether you plan to use an existing development environment or deploy your application on Pega Cloud™). The project estimator returns the result in weeks and hours so that you can conveniently plan the work. You can prepare estimations for a selected release of your application or consider all the planned releases to get a holistic view of your project development.

After you estimate your work, you can share the calculations outside of Pega Platform™ by exporting the results to an Excel file. For example, you may want to discuss the estimations with your stakeholders to bring more transparency and accuracy to the project planning.

To use the Estimator, you first need to define the main elements of your application: 

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

You then assign the channels and data objects to a release to establish a rough estimate of the work planned for each release. By default, Pega Platform™ provides four default releases: MLP 1, MLP 2, MLP n, and Future. The Application Profile also provides an Unplanned release option, which incorporates elements that do not have a release explicitly defined.

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In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the configuration options for the Estimator tool.

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