Featuring Students
Fred Rahmanian Tackles the “Black Art of Software Time and Cost Estimation”

By Greg Rosenthal
Special to FYI Online

Fred Rahmanian

Students who enroll in UMUC’s Master of Software Engineering program cannot complete their degree without passing a demanding capstone course that puts everything they have learned to the test. The course assumes mastery of all the software engineering knowledge required to develop and deliver a real-world software product, and that is exactly what students are asked to do. The professor acts only as a guide or mentor.

Rather than see the assignment as merely a final obstacle to graduation, Fred Rahmanian created a software application called Estimate Easy UC, which not only won a prestigious industry award but also became the basis of his new company, Duvessa Software, named after a dark and mythical Irish sea witch. The name fits because Estimate Easy UC probes what software engineers sometimes call the black art of software time and cost estimation.

Estimate Easy UC predicts how long a project will take and how much it will cost. To do this, the software employs a concept called use-case (UC) points, which are values the program assigns to actors—end users, for example, or other programs, databases, or environmental factors—that influence the success of a software project. Rahmanian’s software assigns weights to these actors and factors based on their complexity and analyzes them to determine the project’s cost and time.

“Use cases are a new way of gathering software requirements,” Rahmanian said. “With this product, once you develop use cases in the requirement phase, you can estimate the size of the project in terms of effort, meaning person-hours.”

Rahmanian, who graduated in May 2003, realized that his capstone project was worth more than just a class grade. “I saw commercial use in that project,” he said, “so I completely revamped it, hired graphic artists, created a more professional interface, added more features, and made it more appealing to commercial users. I tried to make a compelling reason for people to buy it. I completed interactive help, tutorials, and a Web site.” Visitors to Duvessa Software’s Web site have already downloaded more than 2,000 copies of the demo software.

The software industry took notice. Rahmanian submitted his enhanced product to the magazine Software Development for its 14th Annual Software Development Jolt Product Excellence Awards, and on March 17 he learned that Estimate Easy UC won the 2004 Productivity Award for Project Management Tools. Duvessa Software was in good company; Microsoft’s project-management software application, Microsoft Project, also won a 2004 Productivity Award in the same category.

But Rahmanian, who lives in Leesport, Pennsylvania, could not fully enjoy the honor. “I couldn’t attend the awards ceremony in Santa Barbara, California,” he said. “My wife and I have triplets who are a little more than a year old, which makes it a little hard for us to leave anywhere at this point. She gave birth during my last semester at UMUC. It was pretty tough.”

Aside from running Duvessa Software and running after his triplets, Rahmanian, 37, works full time as a senior software engineer and architect at Global Investment Systems in Hackensack, New Jersey. He applied to the Master of Software Engineering program to earn his master’s degree after realizing that a computer science degree would be too academic for his purposes.

“I already had a lot of experience as a developer,” he said. “I wanted to get more involved in the software development process itself rather the science of software development or programming.”

According to Hasan Sayani, professor and program director of the Master of Software Engineering program, Rahmanian found the right place.

“Rather than cobble a system together, we teach students to put it together systematically,” said Sayani, who is also professor and program director of the software development management track of the MS in computer systems management program. “The system would be engineered, not jury-rigged. It goes through the system life cycle: gathering requirements, developing the concept, deciding on the technology, applying the technology to the concept during the design, building it in code, populating databases, testing it.”

Sayani said that the Master of Software Engineering program encourages students to write papers and deliver high-quality work. “Our students’ classroom papers have been accepted and presented at international meetings, including the International Council on Systems Engineering,” he said. “Students present the papers themselves or with a colleague or faculty member, but they typically present by themselves.”

“My goal originally with this project was to contribute to the software engineering field, to give back to it,” said Rahmanian. “I think with the project I’ve done that because it’s a useful tool.”