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Show HN: I built a free app to help devs create more accurate software estimates

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Re: Show HN: I built a free app to help devs create more accurate software estimates

#11

Post by jacques_chester »

I spent a lot of time messing around with doing something similar and not succeeding[1].

I wanted to do full-on decomposed 3-point estimates. Which means representing something that is not quite a tree and not quite a table. Turned out to be harder than I was smart. I got the underlying calculation code to work fine, but never worked out how to get HTML to play along.

I did find reading about estimation to be quite enlightening though. My suspicion is that most of the improvement seen in 3-point estimates comes from decomposing the elements, not from the PERT formula.

[1] http://confidest.com

Re: Show HN: I built a free app to help devs create more accurate software estimates

#12

Post by ams6110 »

pbreit wrote: post #5

Here's one way: double the estimate and then cut the scope in half.

Or the other standby: take the dev estimate, double it, and increase the order of magnitude:

  Dev Estimate     Quote
  ------------     -----------------
  2 hours          4 days
  1 day            2 weeks
etc...

Re: Show HN: I built a free app to help devs create more accurate software estimates

#13

Post by fit2rule »

ams6110 wrote: post #12
pbreit wrote: post #5

Here's one way: double the estimate and then cut the scope in half.

Or the other standby: take the dev estimate, double it, and increase the order of magnitude: Dev Estimate Quote ------------ ----------------- 2 hours 4 days 1 day 2 weeks etc...

This comment and the comment you replied to, are probably the most useful things to be read on HN in a long time. ;)

Re: Show HN: I built a free app to help devs create more accurate software estimates

#15

Post by fit2rule »

davzie wrote: post #7
elevenfist wrote: post #3

Is there any more to this app than a spreadsheet/data input form?

Not yet. I wanted a prettier way to use standard deviation for assessing the most likely value for estimate line items as well as saving those in a nice convenient way. So I built this. Eventually this will branch out to have more features, specifically for agency-style businesses where they may have several worker types with associated internal / external rates etc. For now though, I'm just gathering feedback as to…

Just spent 5 minutes playing with it, looks very nice .. I especially like the visual cues about what is and isn't editable, and the whole app flows pretty nicely .. will come back and have another 5 minutes play with it in a month or so, in case you're going to push things forward .. I'd love to see some graphics in there, rendering the time-range data and showing relevant gravity between them, somehow, akin to some sort of waterdrop diagram .. anyway, good stuff, well done.

Re: Show HN: I built a free app to help devs create more accurate software estimates

#18

Post by highCs »

I've a theory about that too. If you take a software development project, 80% of the stuff takes 20% of the time and 20% of stuff takes 80% of the time. Let's call the former noise and the latter the bottlenecks.

A beginner estimates everything like the noise. So he's dramatically wrong. The novice though, estimates everything like bottlenecks. So he's dramatically wrong too.

This is actually why, in the industry, those agile methods works quite well. They handle that without people realizing.

The next key is to understand that estimates never determines the deadlines. What you can tell the stakeholders does.

So, the only way to succeed is to get the best dates you can from the stakeholders, then build the scope of the app accordingly. Then start treating everything like noise. Find the bottlenecks, focus on them, solve them, repeat.

Lastly, my manager setup a meeting with engineers to estimates the tasks in order to determine the launch date of our app. Before the meeting, he was saying that currently, the date was 15th of may. Then we've made the meeting, the novice estimates 750 days of work. 2 days after, we learn that the launch date is for 15th of may.

Re: Show HN: I built a free app to help devs create more accurate software estimates

#19

Post by elevenfist »

davzie wrote: post #7
elevenfist wrote: post #3

Is there any more to this app than a spreadsheet/data input form?

Not yet. I wanted a prettier way to use standard deviation for assessing the most likely value for estimate line items as well as saving those in a nice convenient way. So I built this. Eventually this will branch out to have more features, specifically for agency-style businesses where they may have several worker types with associated internal / external rates etc. For now though, I'm just gathering feedback as to…

Thank you for being honest! Upvoted.
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