How Do You Accurately Estimate Programming Time?

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?"

Comments

Stupid fucking question

[Gogogoch]

What a stupid fucking question. Go do some research you ignorant twat.

Re:Simply, no software required.

[Hognoxious]

I think you meant that the first 90% of the project takes the first 10% of the time line, and the remaining 10% of the project takes the other 90% of time.

Errr, like yeah, you must be right. Because with what he said the time would add up to 180% - and that's logically impossible. I mean what a clown. Posting on an emailweb when he can't even do basic math. Consider him pwnd.

[exit stage left, shaking head and muttering something about lawns]

Re:Effective Productivity

[Hognoxious]

I start by rating each coders "effective productivity" where for an hour worked, how much time/code actually gets generated.

I can't really put a number on the former, but I can consistently produce 60 minutes of time per hour.

But if you want me to put a number on the amount of code, I can do copy-paste really fast.

Given such a cretinously ignorant start, the lack of paragraphs didn't really encourage me to read further.

Re:I am often subjected to mockery by it, but COCO

[Hognoxious]

"How many lines of code?" is often easier to answer than "how long will this take?"

But it's not what was asked for.

SLOC is a useless metric of productivity - and measuring productivity isn't even the objective here. It's to budget and plan a project. Since the cost of most things involved depends on time (staff are paid by the day) and time is a what's used to coordinate activites (we'll have the system up on 1 March - make sure the users are available), producing an answer in units of SLOC is about as useful as one in feet or ounces.

You say they subject you to mockery. Really?

Re:Chop features.

[Hognoxious]

If he can't do the job, do it for him. He should be impressed with your planning abilities and willingness to take charge. If not, then he's an idiot - look for a new job.

Who died and made you king? You sound like those PHBs I was talking about.

Anyway, I've tried that. Take a guess which happened.