Re:Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
by agumonkey on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @06:57AM
(#22308082)
That's interesting, the few gigs I had were mostly "give us an estimate and see you never"
Re:Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
by dynamite-ready on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @08:09AM
(#22308475)
I can imagine.
It's surprising how few managers value objective estimation. But the problem I suppose, is what it does to the working relationship the rest of the company has with their software development team.
Basically, to allow a team of developers such an 'indulgence', every worker in a given business, including senior managers, have to accept that all interactions with the development team, are led by the development team.
That takes a lot of trust, and you'll rarely find that level of trust outside of a startup.
At their most objective best, everyone on a given development team can gain some insight into the work of others, and how hard it might be.
These session can also be a great way to share knowledge, as developers with different levels of experience and specialisations collectively examine high level goals.
In that, you all have a fair opportunity to either share opinions on the best way to achieve a task, or just merely learn something from someone else about tools or techniques you're unfamiliar with.
And for insightful managers, it's also a great opportunity to communicate high level aims and objective, and occasionally, also break those objectives down, transparently, and explore them.
At worse, estimation sessions can be used as a tool to bully dissenting or inquisitive coders.
Even in it's least positive guise, collective estimation sessions are still valuable. At the very least, you have the opportunity to agree, as a group, on what is, and what isn't going to take 10 or 1000 odd SLOC. You'll also have a better idea (if only slightly better in some cases), of how long that n SLOC will take to write.