Re:Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software...
by martincmartin on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @08:18AM
(#38189918)
When you estimate small tasks, most of the estimates will be accurate, but once in a while, you'll overlook something and a small task turns into a big task, e.g. you need to switch APIs or the customer wanted something that sounded similar but turns out to be much more complicated under the hood. So it's not a Gaussian distribution, it's that once in a while a task blows up.
Re:Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software...
by broast on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @08:27AM
(#38190002)
In my experience, large estimates are only ever Rough Orders Of Magnitude. Our teams do not pull any work in to be done unless they've broken it down to the smallest estimated components. Anything with a large estimate is inherently inaccurate and not ready to plan around.
The situation you described seems quite broken
Re:Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software...
by olddustytrail on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @08:30AM
(#38190026)
So you're saying you didn't get the job and the people who did are getting paid a lot more than they originally bid? :)
Re:Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software...
by benterix on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @10:45AM
(#38192015)
No, I quickly moved to another team and watched my colleagues get fired or quit one by one as they couldn't keep the estimates done by someone else under pressure. It was a surreal experience.
I believe it's all about size. Small tasks can be estimated fairly precisely, with 30% margin maybe. But some people extend this logic to huge projects and this simply doesn't work.
I give you example: I was once asked to estimate the amount of work needed to migrate a huge org from on-prem to one of the public clouds. Without even knowing what kinds of app they were running. I said I can only do a very rough estimate and there are too many variables to be precise. But they insisted and hired someone else to do this job with the precision of half-day!
Needless to say, their estimates were too optimistic because they could only include what they knew. By design, they couldn't measure the things they know nothing about because these issues haven't appeared yet. Last time I checked, they are still migrating and I have a feeling they will finish around the time I had originally planned, that is the second quarter of 2024.