>15+ years of experience gives me enough info to know what timelines should normally be This is my concern. It absolutely doesn't give you that knowledge. Ac

>15+ years of experience gives me enough info to know what timelines should normally be This is my concern. It absolutely doesn't give you that knowledge. Accurately estimating development of non-trivial software is still an open problem. The best solution we have to date is to accept this fact and use it in our process and planning to our advantage when possible. If the work you're talking about is rote and mostly a matter of repeating a pattern rather than innovating and engineering, sure I can see that being more predictable. Unfortunately quite a bit of software development does not fall into that bucket.