4 ms·

I bet that analysis went down like a lead balloon. Any other response than "we were a naughty department, but we have fixed the problem and are really sorry abo

I bet that analysis went down like a lead balloon. Any other response than "we were a naughty department, but we have fixed the problem and are really sorry about it" would have fallen on deaf ears at all the places I have worked. Log-normal? Most people outside of tech dept dont know the difference between mean, median and mode.

jbay808 6y ago
Fortunately, this was a tech-internal meeting; management was sympathetic and pretty tech savvy and understood the takeaway, if not all the math. They had been legitimately worried that the department was not capable of holding to commitments even when they freely selected the date to commit to. And the developers themselves, to be fair, had no idea how good their estimates actually had been the whole time, because it had been viewed through the lens that a ticket that took 8 hours should have been estimated as 8 hours. The presentation to the sales department was very different, and can be summarized as "we'll try to be clearer from now on to distinguish estimated delivery dates from committed delivery dates, and don't be surprised if they're months apart."
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  I'm not sure if I would really consider that a legitimate worry. Software developers' expertise is in developing software, not in analyzing statistics to predict the future. Developer estimates are one of the best data points you have to predict how long something will take, but if you think that you can just take them at face value, you are not doing your job as a manager. You need to compare them to past estimates and how those estimates panned out during development.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Exactly, hence this endeavour! Where we discovered the secret map between the software developers' predictions and reality, which management worried was completely uncorrelated but it turned out to just be the lognormal distribution.
  - kqr 6y ago
    > Software developers' expertise is in developing software, not in analyzing statistics to predict the future. Which is a shame and causes so much wasted work. I wish we all got better at this.
    - underdeserver 6y ago
      Yep. I would claim analyzing statistics to predict the future is an integral component of being a good software engineer.

jbay808 6y ago

Fortunately, this was a tech-internal meeting; management was sympathetic and pretty tech savvy and understood the takeaway, if not all the math. They had been legitimately worried that the department was not capable of holding to commitments even when they freely selected the date to commit to. And the developers themselves, to be fair, had no idea how good their estimates actually had been the whole time, because it had been viewed through the lens that a ticket that took 8 hours should have been estimated as 8 hours. The presentation to the sales department was very different, and can be summarized as "we'll try to be clearer from now on to distinguish estimated delivery dates from committed delivery dates, and don't be surprised if they're months apart."

TheCoelacanth 6y ago
I'm not sure if I would really consider that a legitimate worry. Software developers' expertise is in developing software, not in analyzing statistics to predict the future. Developer estimates are one of the best data points you have to predict how long something will take, but if you think that you can just take them at face value, you are not doing your job as a manager. You need to compare them to past estimates and how those estimates panned out during development.
- jbay808 6y ago
  Exactly, hence this endeavour! Where we discovered the secret map between the software developers' predictions and reality, which management worried was completely uncorrelated but it turned out to just be the lognormal distribution.
- kqr 6y ago
  > Software developers' expertise is in developing software, not in analyzing statistics to predict the future. Which is a shame and causes so much wasted work. I wish we all got better at this.
  - underdeserver 6y ago
    Yep. I would claim analyzing statistics to predict the future is an integral component of being a good software engineer.