3 ms·
> when you the dev says "10 days" then they get haggled down to "2 days" by their boss. Devs are typically optimistic in their estimates. Having someone who wo
by kybernetikos 8y ago
> when you the dev says "10 days" then they get haggled down to "2 days" by their boss.
Devs are typically optimistic in their estimates. Having someone who won't do the work put any kind of downward pressure on an estimate is a great way of getting uninformative estimates.
- philpem 8y agoIn my experience this is largely a function of environment. If you give a realistic estimate and constantly get "stop padding your estimates" or "this needs to be done quicker" in response, after a while you start giving hopelessly optimistic estimates.
- kybernetikos 8y agoYou might be right, however what I've often observed is that people will estimate a task based on how long it would take them to do it if that were their only responsibility. They often ignore the fact that they don't get a full days worth of solid, productive coding due to meetings, build problems, releasing, code review, recruitment, fire alarms, sickness, status reporting... As I recall, at IBM they used to give 3 estimates, best / expected / worst case, and then weight them something like 1/3/5 to get the planning estimate. One person I worked with recorded estimate vs actual for multiple years. They were frequently an order of magnitude out.