How to prepare a good, credible software development workload estimation for quite a complex project? I am looking for methodologies, tools and advice to do it first time in my life.

Hi,

I have been a programmer for 10 years, so I am not totally fresh in software development, but still I do not have much experience in software design concepts 🙂

With friend of mine, we are working on our business idea, right now we are on the business plan level. I am responsible to prepar some rough estimation of a workload of the whole software creation. I have now gathered all the requirements, use cases, features and I have a picture of a final product.

I am aware I am not able to define precisely the workload, but we need to at least catch the order of magnitude and then judge if it is worth to fire up our startup or it’s just waste of time & money. As mentioned, I am not good in conceptual part of software development, I am looking for you valuable advice.

Do you know any good tools, methodologies or software to make it less painful?

I could just create kind of Gant chart in excel, but it’s my last resort unless you think it’s still best way. I would really appreciate your help.

Thanks