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Decomposing as far as you can is a good practice ... you'll still be way off, because you think you know all the problems that you're going to need to solve. So
by kabdib 13y ago
Decomposing as far as you can is a good practice ... you'll still be way off, because you think you know all the problems that you're going to need to solve. So about halfway through the project your list is going to be longer and management is going to be freaking out.
The elephant in the room: Debugging. I don't know how many times I've been asked, "When are you going to find that bug?" Sometimes they are very easy. Sometimes they are very hard. For the really hard bugs, you need to be clever, scientific, determined, methodical and LUCKY. I don't know how to know when I'm going to run into some luck.
- jacques_chester 13y ago> you'll still be way off, because you think you know all the problems that you're going to need to solve Absolutely; but I think it's reasonable to assume that a more accurate estimate is a more valuable estimate. You can also track estimate error over time and use that to adjust future estimates. > The elephant in the room: Debugging. I don't know how many times I've been asked, "When are you going to find that bug?" The problem is that in any sample of n=1, variability is huge. It's like saying "I am going to pick one person out of the global population. How tall is he or she?" Well of course I can't know that. The sample is too small. But if instead I am told "we are going to pick ten thousand people at random from the global population; how tall are they in total?" then I can use previously-gathered statistics to give a range of estimates that will probably be accurate.