Ask HN: How do you estimate a software project?

As the title says.

Sub-question: 1) How do you take all the factors in to account like budget, people, skill levels, geographic distribution (if it is distributed team), hourly rates, etc?

2) What is the best way to manage the project? JIRA, Google sheets, TODO List (!??).

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Well, this is all empirical but the main thing I take into account is Time. Like, if there is any new tech I need to learn, usually it's added into how much time I would spend building the app itself. Then I dig into the complexity of the app. I accumulate these in points and put into a scale of my hourly rate. For example, the highest I charged anyone for a very difficult project is 150/hr which I rate at a 10, the lowest for a simple project is 85/hr.

I add the factors together and see where it rates out of 10 then make the final price per hour.

I like being straight forward, so I use Trello for task management, Github for version control & Slack for communication between me & the client.

Hope this helps!!!

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