7 ms·

Having said that, the alternative of "estimating is a waste of time" is also ridiculous. "Developer, will I be able to catch the next train if I walk, or do I

by IanCal 12y ago

Having said that, the alternative of "estimating is a waste of time" is also ridiculous. "Developer, will I be able to catch the next train if I walk, or do I need to get a taxi?" "Estimating is a complete waste of time" "But I just want to know if I need to spend money on a taxi. It's two miles away and I don't have any bags, and the train leaves in one hour" "Start thinking post-industrially" "FFS, I just want to know how long it'll take me to get to the station!" So what's new here? That estimating an unknown task is silly? Well of course it is! But saying estimates are useless is also daft since there are plenty of times we know a fair amount about the problem, and knowing how long things are likely to take is very helpful in deciding what to do next. If someone asks me how long it'll take to add a bit more information onto a page that we already have in the database, I can give them a fairly good answer since it's a problem that we've done plenty of times and therefore have a good idea about how long it's likely to take. If they want me to find new data sources and integrate them then I can tell them we've never spent less than X weeks doing that so we have to assume it'll take at least that long. If X weeks doesn't seem like a worthwhile investment of time, then even this level of estimation has been useful.

jackgavigan 12y ago
> So what's new here? That estimating an unknown task is silly? Well of course it is! But saying estimates are useless is also daft since there are plenty of times we know a fair amount about the problem, and knowing how long things are likely to take is very helpful in deciding what to do next. What's more, if we don't know enough about the problem to come up with a reasonably-confident estimate, that indicates that we need to define or scope out the problem better.
Tekhne 12y ago
This analogy is flawed, and I think represents the exact problem developers experience with non-developers. There's an underlying assumption that we know what walking or a taxi are. We don't. In this analogy, developers would need to invent both before giving an accurate estimate. The methods of transport are the mechanism for delivering the result of arriving at the desired destination. Software development projects are also about creating the mechanism for arriving at a result. The software is bespoke almost by definition, or you could go buy it off the shelf. Bespoke software is unknown. It's invention. We may be able to apply past experience inventing similar things to our estimations, but there is always some amount of uncertainty. Sometimes there is a lot because we've never built anything like the thing requested. We often may not even understand what is being asked for. If I don't know what a car is, asking me how long it will take to invent one so that you could use it to get to the train is inviting trouble.
- engendered 12y ago
  I'll be the devil's advocate and say that a lot of software development is not particularly novel. A lot of software development is essentially doing minor changes to existing systems, in the same way and format as everything existing, with nothing novel or particularly challenging. If you're asked to add a couple of fields on a CRM form that you've worked on for years, being able to estimate how long changing the storage, data, business and presentation logic should be expected and easy, with high accuracy and very little to no risk. Or maybe you're making yet another minor derivative of a data import task that's slightly different from the hundreds you did before. This is often why businesses demand very specific skillsets, because while I would have no idea how long a Wordpress integration module would take, I would bet that someone who works with it a lot would. There are a lot of software developers who, when given such a task, will try to make it more challenging by rebuilding everything in the process, then throwing up their hands about the complexity involved. It's understandable why business partners get upset about this. There is absolutely inventive software development, but we don't make a credible case when we lump it all in together.
  - thirdtruck 12y ago
    And a lot of these seemingly trivial, familiar tasks require far different time than estimated (both less or more) precisely because no one went back and rebuilt things, thereby leaving an inconsistent, incoherent spaghetti mess behind them. Editing code is more akin to rewriting essays than re-engineering a machine in that way: It's going to take a lot more effort to make a 3rd grader's essay print-worthy than one of Hemingway's.
    - engendered 12y ago
      thereby leaving an inconsistent, incoherent spaghetti mess behind them Generally my experience has been that the inconsistent, incoherent mess develops when people tasked with doing trivial changes try to "fix technical debt" in the process, leaving you partly on the way to a "better" model, at least until the next guy comes along. And then the next guy. Until you have a layer cake of different approaches and technologies and philosophies, degrading to a worse and worse state. Look, I've been doing this for 20 years. Almost everything I work on tends to be novel code. I'm terrible at estimating, and now refuse to do it at all. But there is a lot of self-serving, well, nonsense that we ply in this field, justifying our failures (and the reality that most developers don't want to learn other people's code, so they just short circuit the whole thing and pretend it's higher ground), and the whole "technical debt" thing is one of the most egregious. Most developers, when asked to do something to existing code, will throw their hands up and declare it the worst code they've ever worked with, and they can't possibly make some trivial change without completely rewriting all of it, etc (usually somehow pulling in whatever the pet technology of the month is...sorry, I can't change the web form without turning it into a single-page app built on io.js and React and...). We all tell each other this on boards that we dominate, not realizing how completely ridiculous and transparent it really is. It's always more fun to build something novel than to just modify things that exist. Which is why I really think maintenance programmers are a unique and valuable breed for businesses to have. I personally have a weakness that I always need to rebuild things. I'm terrible as a maintenance programmer, so I simply don't do it. But there are some people who are perfectly happy adapting to whatever they are working on, learning its idioms and unique traits, and then competently and quickly making necessary changes without drama and theatrics about how dire of a situation they've been put in. To abuse the analogies that have been plied, it's being asked to drive somewhere, and first re-building the car into an electric car, then a self-driving car, and then deciding that you want it to be a hyperloop, and then talking about relativity, all while the business just wanted to get from A to B.

by IanCal 12y ago

jackgavigan 12y ago

> So what's new here? That estimating an unknown task is silly? Well of course it is! But saying estimates are useless is also daft since there are plenty of times we know a fair amount about the problem, and knowing how long things are likely to take is very helpful in deciding what to do next. What's more, if we don't know enough about the problem to come up with a reasonably-confident estimate, that indicates that we need to define or scope out the problem better.

Tekhne 12y ago

This analogy is flawed, and I think represents the exact problem developers experience with non-developers. There's an underlying assumption that we know what walking or a taxi are. We don't. In this analogy, developers would need to invent both before giving an accurate estimate. The methods of transport are the mechanism for delivering the result of arriving at the desired destination. Software development projects are also about creating the mechanism for arriving at a result. The software is bespoke almost by definition, or you could go buy it off the shelf. Bespoke software is unknown. It's invention. We may be able to apply past experience inventing similar things to our estimations, but there is always some amount of uncertainty. Sometimes there is a lot because we've never built anything like the thing requested. We often may not even understand what is being asked for. If I don't know what a car is, asking me how long it will take to invent one so that you could use it to get to the train is inviting trouble.

engendered 12y ago
I'll be the devil's advocate and say that a lot of software development is not particularly novel. A lot of software development is essentially doing minor changes to existing systems, in the same way and format as everything existing, with nothing novel or particularly challenging. If you're asked to add a couple of fields on a CRM form that you've worked on for years, being able to estimate how long changing the storage, data, business and presentation logic should be expected and easy, with high accuracy and very little to no risk. Or maybe you're making yet another minor derivative of a data import task that's slightly different from the hundreds you did before. This is often why businesses demand very specific skillsets, because while I would have no idea how long a Wordpress integration module would take, I would bet that someone who works with it a lot would. There are a lot of software developers who, when given such a task, will try to make it more challenging by rebuilding everything in the process, then throwing up their hands about the complexity involved. It's understandable why business partners get upset about this. There is absolutely inventive software development, but we don't make a credible case when we lump it all in together.
- thirdtruck 12y ago
  And a lot of these seemingly trivial, familiar tasks require far different time than estimated (both less or more) precisely because no one went back and rebuilt things, thereby leaving an inconsistent, incoherent spaghetti mess behind them. Editing code is more akin to rewriting essays than re-engineering a machine in that way: It's going to take a lot more effort to make a 3rd grader's essay print-worthy than one of Hemingway's.
  - engendered 12y ago
    thereby leaving an inconsistent, incoherent spaghetti mess behind them Generally my experience has been that the inconsistent, incoherent mess develops when people tasked with doing trivial changes try to "fix technical debt" in the process, leaving you partly on the way to a "better" model, at least until the next guy comes along. And then the next guy. Until you have a layer cake of different approaches and technologies and philosophies, degrading to a worse and worse state. Look, I've been doing this for 20 years. Almost everything I work on tends to be novel code. I'm terrible at estimating, and now refuse to do it at all. But there is a lot of self-serving, well, nonsense that we ply in this field, justifying our failures (and the reality that most developers don't want to learn other people's code, so they just short circuit the whole thing and pretend it's higher ground), and the whole "technical debt" thing is one of the most egregious. Most developers, when asked to do something to existing code, will throw their hands up and declare it the worst code they've ever worked with, and they can't possibly make some trivial change without completely rewriting all of it, etc (usually somehow pulling in whatever the pet technology of the month is...sorry, I can't change the web form without turning it into a single-page app built on io.js and React and...). We all tell each other this on boards that we dominate, not realizing how completely ridiculous and transparent it really is. It's always more fun to build something novel than to just modify things that exist. Which is why I really think maintenance programmers are a unique and valuable breed for businesses to have. I personally have a weakness that I always need to rebuild things. I'm terrible as a maintenance programmer, so I simply don't do it. But there are some people who are perfectly happy adapting to whatever they are working on, learning its idioms and unique traits, and then competently and quickly making necessary changes without drama and theatrics about how dire of a situation they've been put in. To abuse the analogies that have been plied, it's being asked to drive somewhere, and first re-building the car into an electric car, then a self-driving car, and then deciding that you want it to be a hyperloop, and then talking about relativity, all while the business just wanted to get from A to B.