Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
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Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
1–10 of 231 posts
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#2‘You can get good at estimation’
Only if you work in an extremely repeatable well trodden domain. If you are so skilled at estimation, I’m sure Tesla would love you to tell them how long FSD will take and would pay a premium!
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#3One alternative to estimations are projections via (for example) Monte Carlo simulations. I've been happily using https://getnave.com/ for that. The results seem to be in the same ball-park as my old estimations, but with less stress overall.
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#4‘You can get good at estimation’ Only if you work in an extremely repeatable well trodden domain. If you are so skilled at estimation, I’m sure Tesla would love you to tell them how long FSD will take and would pay a premium!
People love to conflate research with development out of "R&D", but the latter is a lot more predictable than the former. Repeatable, well trodden domains are 99,9% of development work out there.
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#5‘You can get good at estimation’ Only if you work in an extremely repeatable well trodden domain. If you are so skilled at estimation, I’m sure Tesla would love you to tell them how long FSD will take and would pay a premium!
You don't need to work in an extremely repeatable domain to get good at estimation. There is very little in my day to day job that is repeatable, but I can roughly look at the project I'm on and compare the scope of it to the projects I've done before.
If you really do think that every project you're working on is completely incomparable to anything you've worked on before you're probably concentrating on too low level details.
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#6‘You can get good at estimation’ Only if you work in an extremely repeatable well trodden domain. If you are so skilled at estimation, I’m sure Tesla would love you to tell them how long FSD will take and would pay a premium!
People love to conflate research with development out of "R&D", but the latter is a lot more predictable than the former. Repeatable, well trodden domains are 99,9% of development work out there.
The problem has always been that while the ground is well trod, the path is never clear. There are hundreds of ways to build any one widget, not even counting that the widget you start building isn’t the one they wanted in their head (but not in the spec).
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#7Software estimation is only hard when you don't understand what you have to do or how it will be done.
Just keep breaking the problem down into sub units that you or your team understand and can fairly accurately understand the effort and risk of (because they've been done before)
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#8A big problem is that estimates given by developers are never treated as estimates but rather as quotes . If you miss your estimate then your employer may expect you to work extra hours to make up for the gap . Best strategy is to under promise over deliver .
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#9Don't do it if you can avoid, especially if company culture is to treat rough estimation as a promised deadline.
If you can't avoid giving estimation, try to pad it as much as possible, add every single uncertainty to the task list, and estimate very conservative. Add enough time for testing, communication, work on change requests.
And even after the original estimate is approved / published be sure to communicate updates to the estimation after every single change request, question, bug, new insight.
And if something by chance take less time than estimated, make sure not to decrease estimation, but to use it as a buffer.
Re: Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
#10Lots of estimation experts out in force today, obviously Hacker News is full of sooth sayers and savants or maybe they just over point everything like everyone else.