Re:It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3
by mitchtbaum on Friday November 08, 2019 @10:55AM
(#21483380)
Yes. I was about to link this too.
From my experiences, I've found that 3x my initial "estimate / goal / ego trip timeline" gives the most realistic picture. Sometimes I can hit my best; most often things come up. It took a little while to accept, mostly because I wanted to do my best always and be able to promise and fulfill it. But Reality hit back, and I had to adjust.
It's hard to see the network effects of each micro-interaction in long range projecting, but once you really break down how long each thing could take, how that would affect each other related part, and who/what else is involved at each step/layer, it clears up the fog.
If I was asked to give some hints, I would say:
- in optimistic and pessimistic cases don't fear to use extreme values
- don't estimate on your own, take reasonable amount of developers with variety of experiences
- don't give exact value to client, give probabilities ("it is very likely that we will be deliver this in between X and Y man-hours/days)
All estimates I made using PERT were quite accurate (<5% time difference between estimated and real execution)