You work in an IT firm that specializes in a certain sort of

You work in an IT firm that specializes in a certain sort of information retrieval for corporations. Your boss has assigned you the task of estimating how long a certain sort of advanced retrieval takes on average. Since a major business is seriously considering an account with your company, your boss wants you to be “99 percent sure” that your estimate falls within a 10-point total spread that you will give him. The variance of these sorts of retrievals is known to be 4800. What is the least number of trials of the system that you would have to run to complete your task (using the techniques that this test covers)?

Solution

Compute Sample Size
n = (Z a/2 * S.D / ME ) ^2
Z/2 at 0.01% LOS is = 2.58 ( From Standard Normal Table )
Standard Deviation ( S.D) = Sqrt(4800) = 69.28
ME =10
n = ( 2.58*69.28/10) ^2
= (178.74/10 ) ^2
= 319.49 ~ 320