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But it's temporary state that will affect behavior and make things permanently worse - not just for the developer, but for everybody. Getting it wrong can infli

But it's temporary state that will affect behavior and make things permanently worse - not just for the developer, but for everybody. Getting it wrong can inflict mortal blows on the enterprise. Having the power players escalate based on status will make it oh so much worse. People need to understand that there is no zero-cost instrumentation and getting measurement wrong is extremely expensive. I have to work backwards from deployment to development or there are problems. Sometimes there are external lags of months between them. People find my line of questioning in this regard very annoying but I do this and others on the team/teams do not, and I have a much better accuracy rate. So they've learned to do this with me. When you're deploying, you're designing a protocol and that's always a challenge. But if you don't do it, the error rate creeps up. I publish a statement of work for each release point and encourage redlines to that. So far it's not drawn any fire. But inadvertently getting a feature in before it's handed off properly causes lots of problems. The critical resource is always human attention.

tyingq 11y ago
I still think you need some kind of estimate. At the very least, you should have a high level of confidence that "what I'm spending to get this" is less than "what value it will deliver". Of course, if you can't be more precise than that, chances are that there's some other piece of work that's more easily estimated, and has a more concrete ROI. That work would logically come first.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Here's the problem. Management is going to make decisions. That's part of their job. They aren't psychic. As you say, you need some kind of an estimate (or at least, management needs you to give them one). But there are times when you don't know. So you handle that by saying something like "I don't know enough now to give you any kind of an estimate. In a month, I'll be able to do enough research that I can give you a realistic estimate." If management will accept that, congratulations! You have management that is willing to live in the real world. But you can't even always do that. I was asked to estimate how long it would take to port something I'd never had to touch before. Well, I don't know. Worse, I don't know how long it will take me to find out, because I don't know how many obstacles I'm going to hit, or how long it takes to get past each obstacle. I'll know when I'm done; I don't know any more precisely than that. I mean, I can say something like "probably less than a year", but I have no idea how to do better in that situation.

tyingq 11y ago

I still think you need some kind of estimate. At the very least, you should have a high level of confidence that "what I'm spending to get this" is less than "what value it will deliver". Of course, if you can't be more precise than that, chances are that there's some other piece of work that's more easily estimated, and has a more concrete ROI. That work would logically come first.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Here's the problem. Management is going to make decisions. That's part of their job. They aren't psychic. As you say, you need some kind of an estimate (or at least, management needs you to give them one). But there are times when you don't know. So you handle that by saying something like "I don't know enough now to give you any kind of an estimate. In a month, I'll be able to do enough research that I can give you a realistic estimate." If management will accept that, congratulations! You have management that is willing to live in the real world. But you can't even always do that. I was asked to estimate how long it would take to port something I'd never had to touch before. Well, I don't know. Worse, I don't know how long it will take me to find out, because I don't know how many obstacles I'm going to hit, or how long it takes to get past each obstacle. I'll know when I'm done; I don't know any more precisely than that. I mean, I can say something like "probably less than a year", but I have no idea how to do better in that situation.