Its impossible to accurately estimate an unknown. Once you have experience, a rough sketch of the solution will pop into your head right away, but as you go al

Its impossible to accurately estimate an unknown. Once you have experience, a rough sketch of the solution will pop into your head right away, but as you go along all these devilish little details will pop up. Also, meetings run by people who can't write code who just want to talk to people for an hour because it breaks up their dull day will eat a decent chunk of time. When starting a new project and in the "give me estimates phase", I do my best, but, I know they are essentially made up numbers. If I were in charge, I would eliminate time estimates. Just have high level goals, keep breaking them down (or up, in bottom up dev) and have lots of automated test cases. I guess like that continuous dev (which I have never done, just read about) style.