Re: Estimates

"Jason Madison" <jason.madison@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:elRyqzrEGHA.376@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>A programmer I work with spent 4 hours producing a 14 day estimate for a
>project. In the event the project took 15 days and his manager was annoyed
>that he had estimated incorrectly.
>
> Is there any research into the ratio between time taken to produce an
> estimate and the accuracy of an estimate? Could it be said for example
> that if the programmer had spent 8 hours on the estimate he would have
> been more likely to have arrived at 15 days?
>

Hi Jason,

First off, your friend's manager needs to get a job in a profession that he
understands.
Secondly, your friend needs to get into the habit of stating, in his
estimates, that they may be off by as much as 25%. Rolling in at under 7% is
super.

Third, if he is spending four hours producing an estimate for a very small
amount of work, then the manager may want to reconsider the need for the
estimate at all. Given that estimates are pretty well useless for most
short projects, I'd suggest that you can improve the overall ability to meet
the customer's needs by doing less estimating, not more, and spend more time
actually writing code.

This last point is a bit controversial. However, if you want proof that
sometimes, the best thing to do is to kill the estimates, read this paper
from David Anderson:
http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Papers/TOCICOBarcelona.html where he
took a small team, killed the estimates, changed a few of the management
policies, and whittled away a long backlog of small changes (like the one
you suggest) to zero in nine months with tremendous increases in
productivity and developer satisfaction.

--
--- Nick Malik [Microsoft]
MCSD, CFPS, Certified Scrummaster
http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this forum are my own, and not
representative of my employer.
I do not answer questions on behalf of my employer. I'm just a
programmer helping programmers.
--


.

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