I like Basecamp’s “Shape Up” guide https://basecamp.com/shapeup
Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
31–40 of 212 posts
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#32I might be in a 1% of engineers that believe in estimation.
Can you make a step plan for some deliverable? No? Then, sorry, it's not that planning is not possible, it is that you are simply not experienced enough. That's fine. There is something called skills, and you can go get them.
Have you made a plan? Great, then is there is some task in your plan that you can't estimate? In rare cases that might be inherently true, but in the majority of cases if you are senior enough any given task you're asked to do at Company A is going to be something similar to some task you've done in your prior experience and you can collect personal data on that.
A plan with per task estimates and you have an estimate for a deliverable. The next piece, and this is crucial, is you aim at and execute rigorously to the plan -- prioritizing as you go. If you do any "padding" for insurance, you DO NOT add arbitrary constants or double etc to your estimates. You add extra scope, ie tasks delivering real value, to your plan, but scope that can be cut, if needed, as part of your rigorous execution, en route, if you find in iterations that you're slipping.
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#33Yea, effort estimation is a waste of time much like building a piece by piece project plan of anything.
The key is workflows, like how buildings used to be built. You just keep working on it - no stupid schedule that fails immediately once one little detail to follow goes wrong. Building accurate plans never works and it takes ridiculous amounts of time.
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#34I might be in a 1% of engineers that believe in estimation. Can you make a step plan for some deliverable? No? Then, sorry, it's not that planning is not possible, it is that you are simply not experienced enough. That's fine. There is something called skills, and you can go get them. Have you made a plan? Great, then is there is some task in your plan that you can't estimate? In rare cases that might be inherently t…
I tend to disagree. Estimate this more complex situation: Integrate vendor B’s API where you don’t have prior experience with vendor B’s product let alone their API, and where our system is built specifically around vendor A’s API and workflow. This requires backend and frontend (customer and admin UI) changes given that everything is tied to vendor A’s API currently.
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#35My instinct is that if you can put numbers and predictions based on real world estimations, then you are estimating simple things. For example, you can estimate how long it will drive from A to B. Google maps does a brilliant job of this, showing the busy sections. Often I get there +/- a minute from what is estimated over a 60 minute journey. But estimating how long someone will take to do a project, where the proje…
> We are building Sydney Opera Houses. Sorry, this made me laugh. I know there are software engineers which build clean and polished beautiful mega structures. I _aspire_ to that. Yet that is a niche market. In reality, most devs are making unique family Vilas at best. I wish I could ever say I feel like I contributed to an equivalent of 'Sydney Opera House'.
I am reminded of software like the “Snake” malware. Not exactly “ostentasteful” like the Sydney Opera House but grand and intricate with a specific, kinda-but-not-exactly unique purpose.
(I’m sure there are other examples but my mind has an information security bias and I learned about “Snake” recently.)
Not the bespoke CMS I work on for Bob’s Bait Shop.
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#36My instinct is that if you can put numbers and predictions based on real world estimations, then you are estimating simple things. For example, you can estimate how long it will drive from A to B. Google maps does a brilliant job of this, showing the busy sections. Often I get there +/- a minute from what is estimated over a 60 minute journey. But estimating how long someone will take to do a project, where the proje…
> We are building Sydney Opera Houses. Sorry, this made me laugh. I know there are software engineers which build clean and polished beautiful mega structures. I _aspire_ to that. Yet that is a niche market. In reality, most devs are making unique family Vilas at best. I wish I could ever say I feel like I contributed to an equivalent of 'Sydney Opera House'.
Most of us our building prefab housing, but the challenge is there's infinite ways to put the modules together, and unlike real housing no physics to reduce the problem set of possbilities.
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#37It's not fake research. It's actually quite an established science in the 24 years I've been doing it.
Take your first guess, double it, double it again if the stakeholder is a poser, add 20% per developer less experience than you, subtract 10% for the features you're going to essentially copy paste, add 15% for sick leave (browsing HN) and then double it for every question you have that are unresolved and divide it by the room temperature multiplied by the amount of people with mechanical keyboards.
That gives you roughly the right estimate for any job, until the next sprint.
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#38I feel like the core problem here is one that can never be resolved, because it's the result of two valid but opposing forces. On one hand you have business stakeholders, who can see the business reality - money doesn't grow on trees and runways are very real and scary, so without deadlines companies fundamentally cannot function. On the other hand you have engineers, who either explicitly or implicitly understand th…
When the problem can never be resolved, you redefine the problem until you find a version of the problem with a good solution. So if the problem is that software is hard to estimate, which is hard, we redefine the problem to something like “I want to be able to ship something people want to buy, before we run out of money” or “I want to ship a game in time for Christmas” or “I want to reduce operating costs so we don…
I love this.
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#39Interesting that most of the top comments here seem to be about the day to day process of estimation itself, when the linked article is about how poorly the research on estimation has been done to date. Did any of you actually read the article?
Re: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
#40It's not fake research. It's actually quite an established science in the 24 years I've been doing it. Take your first guess, double it, double it again if the stakeholder is a poser, add 20% per developer less experience than you, subtract 10% for the features you're going to essentially copy paste, add 15% for sick leave (browsing HN) and then double it for every question you have that are unresolved and divide it…
Wait! this is my method, and its patented! You need a licence sir ;)