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Re:Software development requires servant leaders by humanrebar on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:28AM (#17765841)
> Previous work shows we can handle a project of this size in 6 months 85% of the time

More like: Previous work shoes that this project should take between one week and eighteen months at a 95% confidence interval.

...there aren't many projects one can do 300 times to narrow that window. And asking for a date instead of a confidence interval is asking for an ambiguous estimate in the first place.

Re:Software development requires servant leaders by jdmichal on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:49AM (#17765986)
Another tenet is that work is work. You attempt to break the work into chunks that are close enough to previous work efforts to use your model. If you can't do that, then you don't actually have any idea of what you're doing yet. Which is fine, but you certainly can't estimate in that state.