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Please do not downvote this comment. mikro2nd is expressing something that I've also felt and I have heard from multiple other engineers in the hallway track at

Please do not downvote this comment. mikro2nd is expressing something that I've also felt and I have heard from multiple other engineers in the hallway track at conferences and in 1-on-1s. As such, even if you disagree with the opinion, it is still an important contribution to the discussion. If you believe that there is a reliable method for producing time-measured estimates which a software engineer can learn -- a method which is not magic but is merely work -- it would be highly valuable for you to lay that out here.

HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
Sure! Truly accurate time tracking and recording. Then using those historical times to inform future estimates. Most development we do is not the great unknown. If it took you 10 hours to design, code and test the update to a Student record for a db application last year in Java, it will likely take you roughly 10 hours this year to do something similar in the same language. The problem is that most organizations are unwilling to develop the rigor of recording time on task accurately and saving them in such a way that the times can be retrieved later, and using those recorded times to estimate future work. All of that takes effort and it's effort that's not billable to a project, so no one wants to do it. But when you do it, it does work!