Re:Show HN: A developer tool for estimating software project...
by jhbrown on Thursday January 19, 2023 @07:37PM
(#34447689)
You're exactly right! Under the hood, DoomCheck actually uses a log-logistic distribution -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-logistic_distribution -- which it fits using the range endpoints as 10% and 75% respectively. Then it does a Markov simulation to combine them across the whole project.
It's very deceptive to say a task will take 4 hours. It's much better to estimate it'll take 2-8 hours, as you do. I think it's another step more realistic to say it's a log-normal curve... then you can get a prediction like:
...and so on. This mimics how task duration actually works in real life, in my opinion. The average completion time wouldn't vary that much, but the tails are treated very differently. With this you'd be able to sum up the probability of the the deviation from that average over many tasks.