Re:Forecast, don't guesstimate your software projects
by pmarino90 on Saturday June 13, 2020 @05:18PM
(#23512815)
It is indeed true that arguing about complexity, while estimating, is useful to spark conversations about the item at hand.
I feel that _estimations_ per se are not a good way to achieve those interesting conversations. You can, for example, analyze those items using the cynefin framework.
The tricky thing about estimations is that, for some people, they end up being a promise that then is used to plan the future leading, in some cases, to an unpleasant reality check.
Or at least that’s what I’ve told myself, but admittedly it doesn’t address the central issue of we still don’t know how long this will take. We can usually tell if something is “days” vs “weeks” of work but we still get those terribly wrong sometimes. I’ve found people don’t like it when I say “it’ll get done when it‘s done” though so I’m forced to keep trying.
In practice we just try to write code in a way where most things can be done in “days” of time because the variance in your outcome tends to grow very quickly when the estimate is larger.