The project experiences from development, maintenance and bug fixing kind of projects for the legacy applications have been considered while preparing this paper. Predictive management will discuss about predicting the remaining time, midway through the project execution period. Practicing the modus operandi mentioned in the paper helps in interactions with the different stakeholders in a more professional and robust manner, as the entire communication will be based on quantitative data. The paper shares the estimation experience gained from executing legacy projects and supports the readers with some of the best practices to be adopted for estimation in legacy projects.

During the initiation of any software project, one of the key challenges faced by project managers is with respect to estimating the effort required for execution of the project. Especially in this highly competitive world of software, the ability to come up with an accurate estimate for the project is one of the most desired competencies from any project manager.

One of the major inputs for the project manager in deciding the estimated effort is the size of the work product coming out of the project. The accuracy in the project's effort estimate will depend on how accurately the size of the deliverables is estimated. One of the contributing factors for failure of software projects is that many projects get estimated based on the "personal working methods/experience" of the project managers. There is lot of information available in the knowledge base industry on estimating the projects. Few of the industry standard practices and estimation mechanisms are listed here.

project experiences,development, maintenance, bug fixing, kind of projects, legacy applications, Predictive management project execution period, modus operandi interactions, stakeholders, professional and robust manner, entire communication, quantitative data.