Software Time Estimates
This cluster focuses on the challenges, inaccuracies, and strategies for time estimation in software development, including frustrations with managers, tips for adding buffers, and why estimates often fail.
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A try it yourself experiment: simply start giving accurate time estimates to project managers, and see how long it takes them to call you a pessimist :)
How do you handle that time estimates never match reality?
Be glad. Worst is when managers estimate themselves.Be pessimistic, don't count happy flow only. Count also meetings and other organizational slowdowns into estimation. It can be anything between 30% to 200% of needed time depending on what politics on your company is.Break it down, and guess shortest time possible, longset time possible and them most likely time for each task. Then do (min+max+4×likely)/6 and sum them. The result will look intuitively too long, but resist tempta
ah the famous "give us dev estimates, but yours are too long, lets go with shorter anyway" makes people afraid to estimate high
Maybe you need to use a less optimistic task estimation formula?
Hi, when I need to estimate than I'm always adding some margin for unexpected work and this is such a case, especially in projects with lot of legacy code :)
Software time estimations are always going to be bad, you might as well ask an LLM.
The best way to estimate is to start work and benchmark your progress against your estimates
Easy way out - if you estimated 3 days and it turns out to be 3 hours ... simply sit on it for 2 more days ;-)
I applaud the thought, but then they have to have an estimate of how long the estimate will take... which often ends-up wrong.