iMadalina on .Life

The Wideband Delphi process significantly improves the accuracy of estimates. Here is the process:

1. Gather some people to help. Wideband Delphi recommends a team of two to five people. Bring in some people who have experience building a similar type of application, as well as some who have never built this kind of application. Multiple perspectives are valuable.
2. Provide an overview of the work to be estimated. The person most familiar with the work gives the group a brief outline of the task at hand, focusing on requirements.
3. Derive individual estimates. Every person in the room thinks about the problem and privately notes his assumptions. Then, on an index card, each person writes down his estimate in ideal effort-hours, and places it facedown on the table.
4. Reveal the estimates and discuss assumptions. A facilitator reveals the anonymous estimates. What does everyone expect to happen here? The result is similar to multiple people guessing the number of bouncy balls on my desk without much information-estimates vary widely. A facilitated discussion about the assumptions that factored into the estimates ensues.
5. Iterate from Step 3 until estimates match up. Each individual learns from the others in the room, updates his assumptions, and provides a new estimate. Estimates start converging. Continue this process until convergence is satisfactory.

Why does this technique work? Wideband Delphi incorporates the experience of others, is feedback-driven, allows estimators to go with their gut by keeping the first round anonymous, and facilitates learning. You quickly discover invalid or missed assumptions, while refining high-level requirements and design. The team agrees upon assumptions, documents decisions, and now has rationale for their numbers.

[Source: MSDN Magazine]

Full Text Search is available in SQL Express if the edition is Advanced Services. However, what you will not find very easily is that it only works on text columns, not image columns. I found a very helpful article on how you can use the Express to to your job with FTS in a very elegant manner. Here it is:

http://www.wherecanibuyit.co.uk/ASP/full-text-search.html