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It occurs to me that software has never had to adopt these practices. It's an industry with a high gross profit margin. If you have a hit, you can get with jus
by jacques_chester 10y ago
It occurs to me that software has never had to adopt these practices.
It's an industry with a high gross profit margin. If you have a hit, you can get with just about any process or non-process. So you never need to invest heavily in better estimation.
If you don't have a hit, you will probably go out of business. So you never get the chance to invest heavily in better estimation.
- ScottBurson 10y agoYou're talking as if better estimation were an end in itself. It's not. The goal is a successful business. There's no point in spending any more effort on estimation than is needed to support the planning required to make the business a success; any more effort than that is simply wasted. If the expected ROI on a project is small, then having really good estimates matters a lot, because it can make the difference between profit and loss. But if the expected ROI is large, precise estimates matter less. Tom DeMarco has famously made this point [0]. [0] http://www.systemsguild.com/pdfs/DeMarcoNov2011.pdf http://www.systemsguild.com/pdfs/DeMarcoNov2011.pdf
- jacques_chester 10y ago> There's no point in spending any more effort on estimation than is needed to support the planning required to make the business a success; any more effort than that is simply wasted. This is basically what I argued. Software businesses often have such fantastic margins that you can do any old thing and still rake it in.