Re:An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage
by voxl on Thursday December 14, 2017 @02:02PM
(#15925616)
Except you can't, as I've said, engineers are not good at estimating. They get significantly worse when you start estimating months out instead of days out.
The problem is not that they're engineers, no one is good at estimating work they've never done before. This is a well known problem in pretty much every single software shop I've ever been in. Teams never deliver what was planned on time, only functional teams cut features for releases. This is not a "win" for estimation.
Re:An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage
by naasking on Friday December 15, 2017 @09:04AM
(#15931825)
> Except you can't, as I've said, engineers are not good at estimating. They get significantly worse when you start estimating months out instead of days out.
Because you keep focusing on time estimates instead of point estimates. People have intrinsic biases related to time and their productivity. Like how most people implicitly assume they're above average in intelligence, looks, etc.
However, it’s hard to make long-range estimates using only many tiny stories/bugs, because you don’t want to break the job down with such granularity for months or years into the future - plans will change by then, and all that design work will have been wasted. That’s what makes big stories useful; you can estimate months of work in a few minutes. But because they’re so big, you can’t treat them all as equal sized.