“This project will only take 2 hours”
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“This project will only take 2 hours”
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Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#2Great point, and a good way of illustrating it.
But I have to respond: Or you could grab something similar and use that as a beginning point. Say, for this application, `clipman` which gives me a popup list of the last few clipboard entries. Get into that and add some regexp filter and log output and it need not even interfere with the original functionality.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#3Great example. This is something I struggle with myself, but it especially annoys me when my non-engineer friends complain about bugs or missing features when we game together.
“Why can’t I just do {x}, it would be easy to implement, any programmer could do it, why are {y company}’s developers so incompetent”.
Now I have a link to send them rather than awkwardly coming up with an example on the spot of why {x} is probably way more complicated than it seems, assuming you want it to actually work in any meaningful way.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#4This sounds more like a problem of scope creep than unexpected complexity
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#5This sounds more like a problem of scope creep than unexpected complexity
Scope creep happens when you discover new requirements after defining a project scope and delivering an estimate. The type of analysis outlined in the article is helpful to define a sane and reasonable scope upfront, to hopefully avoid creep down the line.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#6Honestly I learned this lesson as a young engineer, as I suspect many others did, by giving a project manager an off the cuff answer to "how long will this take".
The next month of embarrassingly explaining why I was late every Tuesday and Thursday was enough for me to now take a serious amount of time, come up with a realistic estimate, and then add a lot of buffer. Better to under promise and over deliver.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#7Great point, and a good way of illustrating it. But I have to respond: Or you could grab something similar and use that as a beginning point. Say, for this application, `clipman` which gives me a popup list of the last few clipboard entries. Get into that and add some regexp filter and log output and it need not even interfere with the original functionality.
I think that both article and you are missing a very big aspect of development - ongoing support.
This is specially problematic when using existing code to create new product for a specific use case\client. It may not take very long but what everyone seems to forget is that this new product has to be maintained. Every time new feature is added to base code, it has to be tested with that new product as well. Repeat that 10-15 times and it becomes difficult if not impossible to add new feature to base code without either breaking some downstream code or getting bogged in updating numerous programs and then testing and then fixing the issues then testing again...
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#8Honestly I learned this lesson as a young engineer, as I suspect many others did, by giving a project manager an off the cuff answer to "how long will this take". The next month of embarrassingly explaining why I was late every Tuesday and Thursday was enough for me to now take a serious amount of time, come up with a realistic estimate, and then add a lot of buffer. Better to under promise and over deliver.
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Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#9> A few students came to me asking if I had any ideas for a software project that they could work on outside of class.
> I explained an idea for a utility that I had been wanting: A desktop program that monitors my clipboard for URLs and logs them automatically.
I think this person misunderstood the students, the student wanted a project to practice programming, not a project to practice project management. The programming parts of this would take 2-4 hours, it isn't a terribly hard thing to code. All the project management parts would take days or weeks or even months or years depending on how polished you want it to be.
Giving them a project management project because in your mind project management is more important just to prove a point doesn't help them at all.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#10This sounds more like a problem of scope creep than unexpected complexity
It's in the article:
> The goal isn't to fall into a feature rabbit hole, but rather to understand your assumptions about the project. If I don't do this exercise and I try to build it, then I will often run into two or three crux issues that I could have easily known about from the start. Don't go implement every feature idea you come up with from this exercise!