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A comment on What Do We Know About Time Pressure in Software Development?. Parent comment

Re:What Do We Know About Time Pressure in Software Development? by seadan83 on Thursday January 13, 2022 @07:44PM (#29929118)
I wish I could find the reference, one study showed that additional time spent estimating does not improve estimate accuracy. Only historical data regarding similar tasks were where estimates could be made accurately.

Example: How long will it take you to lean advanced physics? Even if I gave you a week, your estimate is likely worthless (maybe precise, but not accurate). To me this makes sense because you cannot know the unknown unknowns until you hit them (and throw in some of the journeyman fallacy)

Meanwhile, how long will it take to brush your teeth is easy to estimate. How long will it take to brush your teeth with a new electric toothbrush is also reasonable to estimate.

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Re:What Do We Know About Time Pressure in Software Development? by kqr on Friday January 14, 2022 @12:37AM (#29930975)
The book Rapid Development is somewhat evidence-based, has a chapter on estimation and concludes the same thing. At every stage of a project, there's just some amount of inherent uncertainty and spending more effort on estimation does not remove this uncertainty -- only getting further in the implementation does.
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Re:What Do We Know About Time Pressure in Software Development? by dogline on Thursday January 13, 2022 @08:06PM (#29929297)
> How long will it take you to lean advanced physics?

I like that as an example to a layman of why this might be a hard thing to estimate.

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