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I think Steve McConnell was calling for statistical modelling even earlier than that. Definitely not a new idea!

I'm working on the assumption that it hasn't caught on because it's a pain to do without proper tooling; but it's also true that many engineers believe estimation is useless, impossible, and a waste of time or worse. It can be hard to overcome the pain of having been burned by a too-tight timeline.

Steve McConnell wrote the Construx Estimation Tool way back in the '90s. It made use of Monte Carlo simulations. I still have a copy.

> I'm surprised that it didn't become more popular

It gave managers answers they didn't want to hear.

Came here to bring up FogBugz having this if someone else didn't already.