Oh ye that one. I remember reading that and thinking to my self "that can't possibly work" - years before I was exposed to Agile for the first time learning fir

Oh ye that one. I remember reading that and thinking to my self "that can't possibly work" - years before I was exposed to Agile for the first time learning first hand how silly upfront no-research estimations are. What I learned is that people pad and fudge numbers to make the burndown chart nice, which might be what Spolsky's employees did in the end to please his try to make an estimation tool. Also, breaking down task in my experience counterintuitively makes them harder to estimate. I.e. summing many small estimates over doing one big for the set of subtasks.