Comment by swader999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swader999 | Hacker News Reader

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If you gave accurate estimates you'd get fired for taking so long to produce those estimates.

Ask your stakeholders how accurate each estimate needs to be and how much they want to spend on estimating. Where I'm at now a simple complexity score of 1,3,5,8,13 works fine and gives us +-30% variance and predictive power for new work when translating points into time spent after about three months of work and collecting the velocity.

We spend about five minutes answering how complex is this for each story. To get a 10% variance takes the team a half day for anything non trivial. You have to go through this exercise in both extremes with the stakeholders and then you get buy in for the fast estimating.

Google Mike Griffiths cone of uncertainty for the real take on this.

A team I was once on would take 2-4 days to estimate how much work we could get done in the next two months. We were usually pretty close! The important thing to understand here is that we had complete buy-in from Management. This was part of our process, and they understood that we needed that time to do a good job of estimation and risk management.

The problem in most organizations seems to be that no one is willing to absorb the cost of real estimation.

While that may be a reason, I strongly suspect the real reason is that engineers simply don't want to spend time estimating. In my experience most people think breaking projects down into small chunks and estimating each chunk is terribly boring, they'd much rather have bigger and less defined chunks so they can start coding faster.

I think thorough planning and estimations usually makes for both better and faster outcomes, but I'm unlikely to push for it simply because a full day of planning (or more) every two weeks is pretty damn boring. Doing some light high-level planning and diving into things is less efficient, but way more fun even if you end up having to backtrack more etc.

I agree that it's boring as hell. It usually starts out as kind of fun, but halfway through the first day, your eyes are starting to glaze over.

OTOH, it's part of a quality process and if your organization is driven by the need to produce high-quality output, accurate size & effort estimations are a part of how you get there.

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