How Do You Accurately Estimate Programming Time? 483
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Soulskill
from the step-one-invent-time-travel dept.
from the step-one-invent-time-travel dept.
itwbennett writes "It can take a fairly stable team of programmers as long as six months to get to a point where they're estimating programming time fairly close to actuals, says Suvro Upadhyaya, a Senior Software Engineer at Oracle. Accurately estimating programming time is a process of defining limitations, he says. The programmers' experience, domain knowledge, and speed vs. quality all come into play, and it is highly dependent upon the culture of the team/organization. Upadhyaya uses Scrum to estimate programming time. How do you do it?"
Re:Simply, no software required. (Score:5, Informative)
The George Carlin Principle... (Score:2, Informative)
1) One or more of your highest performers works extensive amounts of overtime (and is likely to burnout)
2) Project times are consistently overestimated.
It's a variation of the George Carlin Principle... People will adapt to fill the space, one way or the other.
Hofstadter's Law (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Simply, no software required. (Score:3, Informative)
fortune, aptly, sprung this on me last night:
Re:Chop features. (Score:3, Informative)
No, because the people who actually do software development know that using "parametric tools to estimate development schedules" means guessing the future based on an approximation of the past.
Re:Well, I *used* to use the entrails of goats... (Score:3, Informative)
Hydrogen monoxide would be pretty reactive. Dihydrogen monoxide, on the other hand...
Re:Simply, no software required. (Score:1, Informative)
two days, I estimate 4 weeks
Nah, by his own words, he just multiplied the actual time by 4.
8 days != 4 weeks. Guess again.
Since the units are not uniform (like metric), moving up a time unit will have uneven results across all possibilities.
2 seconds becomes 4 minutes (240 seconds) so x120
2 minutes becomes 4 hours (240 minutes) so x120
2 hours becomes 4 days (96 hours) so x48
2 days becomes 4 weeks (28 days) so x14
2 weeks becomes 4 months (Roughly 8-10 weeks) so x4-5 (as your limited set suggested)
2 months becomes 4 years (48 months) so x24
2 years becomes 4 decades (40 years) so x20
2 decades becomes 4 centuries (400 years) so x200
Average of the above multipliers: x68.75
Average of just hours, days, weeks: x33
My Way (Score:2, Informative)
my $initial_project_time = length($piece_of_string) / ($count_programmers);
my $real_project_time = ($initial_project_time + ($scope_creep_time * $count_non_it_business_staff)) * $3.14;
if ($slave_driving_boss eq "yes") {
$real_project_time = $real_project_time / 2.5;
$quality = 60;
$bugs = random;
}