The estimate isn’t as useful but the process you go through to arrive at it can be. It forces our team to ask questions about high risk aspects of our code - wh

The estimate isn’t as useful but the process you go through to arrive at it can be. It forces our team to ask questions about high risk aspects of our code - where do we need to get data from? Does this touch <scary legacy service>? Or at least that’s what I’ve told myself, but admittedly it doesn’t address the central issue of we still don’t know how long this will take. We can usually tell if something is “days” vs “weeks” of work but we still get those terribly wrong sometimes. I’ve found people don’t like it when I say “it’ll get done when it‘s done” though so I’m forced to keep trying. In practice we just try to write code in a way where most things can be done in “days” of time because the variance in your outcome tends to grow very quickly when the estimate is larger.