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I think estimates of effort required, estimates of timeline, and commitments to timeline (deadlines) are three different things with only loose relationships th
by dllthomas 7y ago
I think estimates of effort required, estimates of timeline, and commitments to timeline (deadlines) are three different things with only loose relationships that are far too often conflated - to significant pain. I'm trying to play with this a bit in my personal process (and talking to my team about it) but don't really have any hard results yet.
- milesvp 7y agoVery much this. I try to never give an estimate without giving 2 values. The expected effort, and the expected calendar time. Sometimes I’ll also add expected complexity since that adds a lot of risk to both estimates. There are lots of things I’ve done that were quite easy, then I spend lots of time just sheparding the feature into production. Especially if you’re working with other teams, or vendors, and can expect 24hr delays for every email round trip. In fact each department or vendor involved in a project will easily double calendar date, and often complexity as well. At a previous job we automatically increased our t-shirt size for every vendor just to keep our estimates honest. And there was only like one vendor who we would make exceptions for since they were always amazing to work with.