4 ms·
Properly estimating is probably one of the hardest things to do in our field, specially so if you are starting a product or company where you have to go with yo
by Mahn 11y ago
Properly estimating is probably one of the hardest things to do in our field, specially so if you are starting a product or company where you have to go with your gut for a lot of the decisions. I think the key to survive this is not so much learning to get estimates right, but being prepared for them to be wrong, that's probably why the "multiplicative factor" gets thrown around so often. The good thing is that the more experience you have at estimating things wrong, the better you'll become at guessing what the "multiplicative factor" should be. I started with 10 a few years ago, nowadays it's down to 4 :)
- bhartzer 11y agoProperly estimating is not just difficult in your field, it's difficult anywhere in 'software' or tech. You always run into issues along the way, and you have to deal with them.
- ergothus 11y agoI usually attribute this to the idea of reuse: by definition, every software problem we are solving is "new", because if it wasn't new we'd just use existing solutions and there'd be no team. (Now there are people that insist on resolving problems, but they put themselves into the "new" category by choice). New problems mean unknown ways to fail === hard to estimate