Same way I did 20 years ago, I get to play "guess the number I'm thinking of." Only now I play it with a product person instead of my manager.
Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
31–40 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#32Guess how long it ought to take, double it, then double that.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#33The below is a joke, but sadly it is representative of most teams I have worked on. If it's like anything that most managers do, you have the team come up with estimates, have some meetings to see if you missed anything, discover that you did, then create a schedule, remembering to add slack time for unforeseen interruptions due to people getting sick, customer issues, etc. Then you see that the schedule is too long.…
I think I need to talk to my therapist after reading this
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#34In general estimates are risk assessments. With that in mind, I think the way to go about estimates depends on the experience level of the indivual or team. The best estimates are not only a number (or a t-shirt size), they also include a list of possible things that can go wrong (either as an internal dialog or, in the best case, written down as part of the estimation).
There are many methods to get this assessment. These are the ones I have used:
* Basic level: Write down everything that needs to be done and assign a time estimate (in hours, otherwise break down further)
* Intermediate level: Write down everything that needs to be done and assign a range of time in days (from best to worst case scenario)
* Expert level: Use an abstract scale (like the fibonacci sequence, T-shirt sizes, etc)
* "We've been doing this together for 20 years" level: Can it be done in XY time? Yes or No answers only.
In each of these levels the specific time it will take to complete the task becomes less and less specific. The reasons to keep it specific, are a) to learn how to estimate well and b) to keep people accountable. Reasons to keep it unspecific are that a) it's impossible to get a correct number for a task you've never done before, thus b) it's a waste of time to try and make an estimate accurate.
The value of all these estimation techniques is to find out where the most risk lies (usually there where the most unknowns / complexity lies). If you then don't follow up on those risks by checking in with the team, the estimation becomes useless. If you manage these risks well, you should at the very least have consistent estimates. Even if their real-time equivilant is off, it should be off by a consistent amount.
Most important of all though: Estimatation is a learned skill and not inherent to anybody (developers or managers). It takes time and practice to get going accurately.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#35The below is a joke, but sadly it is representative of most teams I have worked on. If it's like anything that most managers do, you have the team come up with estimates, have some meetings to see if you missed anything, discover that you did, then create a schedule, remembering to add slack time for unforeseen interruptions due to people getting sick, customer issues, etc. Then you see that the schedule is too long.…
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Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#36The below is a joke, but sadly it is representative of most teams I have worked on. If it's like anything that most managers do, you have the team come up with estimates, have some meetings to see if you missed anything, discover that you did, then create a schedule, remembering to add slack time for unforeseen interruptions due to people getting sick, customer issues, etc. Then you see that the schedule is too long.…
As a dev who has quite some freedom managing himself, I learned to multiply my own estimates by about 2-2.5.
If I had a bad case of managers, I would probably multiply by four.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#37Estimates that are most successful, in my experience, leverage four perspectives: realistic (for people who prefer a quick approximation), optimistic-pessimistic (for people who prefer ranges and risks), and equilibristic (for people who leverage critical path and critical chain). The mnemonic is ROPE.
https://github.com/SixArm/sixarm_project_management_rope_est...
Estimates as work-hours by the person most-likely to do the work tend to work the best in my experience. Estimates as work-hours also are clear and direct for upper management, or across to other stakeholder organizations.
If your estimates are solely within one team or sprint, then story points tend to feel fun and easy. If you can skip estimates all together then that's superb-- it helps to have a skilled team and also a high trust environment.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#38I read this somewhere about how to do estimates and it has stuck with me:
"Double the number and increment the unit."
This is a simple formula to calculate how long something takes to go from idea to production.
So, 3 hours becomes 6 days; 2 weeks is 4 months, etc.
Enjoy!
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#39The below is a joke, but sadly it is representative of most teams I have worked on. If it's like anything that most managers do, you have the team come up with estimates, have some meetings to see if you missed anything, discover that you did, then create a schedule, remembering to add slack time for unforeseen interruptions due to people getting sick, customer issues, etc. Then you see that the schedule is too long.…
As a dev who has quite some freedom managing himself, I learned to multiply my own estimates by about 2-2.5. If I had a bad case of managers, I would probably multiply by four.
I remember one of Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design being something like: take your original estimates, multiply the time by π and shift the decimal on cost one place to the right.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#40Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates. If you're a company that plans far in advance, the same is true. You'll demand the work you wanted is done at a given date, again regardless of how difficult it was. At my company, we have a well mai…
When prioritizing, it's not always obvious which items are big vs small. How do you provide that feedback to PM during prioritization?
Sometimes implementing what should be a simple feature requires a month of refactoring some old technical debt. And sometimes what seems like a very complex feature is actually just a matter of enabling a flag on some third party component you're already using.
All is us have likely experienced "why is x taking so long?? Had we known, we wouldn't have done it now!" and/or "we didn't realize y was so simple, otherwise we would have done it months ago and probably won a few more deals!" How do you avoid that?