I wouldn't be at all surprised if the relationship between estimate and actual typically followed a power law relationship, in which case speaking about any averaging over time is meaningless anyway.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the relationship between estimate and actual typically followed a power law relationship, in which case speaking about any averaging over time is meaningless anyway.
Part of the point of estimating difficulty is exactly to reduce the one-sidedness evident in time estimations. Human brains are much more accurate and consistent with effort estimation than time. It's still very likely a beta distribution but for the level of accuracy we're talking about it's just fine.
We should probably clarify the "bar" here: the very best time estimators never beat about +30% delta from actual time. (Note that I'm not using +/- intervals because it's only ever +). So how many points (effort/time ratio values) does it take for convergence to get your effort/time ratio mean within 30% of the peak of the curve?
What's interesting on that specific 50% miss I saw is that the original estimate from the actual teams themselves was argued down as "too big, do it again" by their own management...