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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?"
I pull numbers out of my ass.
If I am ahead of schedule, rock on
If I am directly on schedule, rock on
If I am behind schedule, creatively blame something that is out of my control to begin with, rock on
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
After 40+ years of programming it's still a Wild Assed Guess.
You're never given enough time to prepare your estimate, marketing has already
determined the delivery date, and management doesn't know what it is you're
supposed to create anyway.,
I wish I had mod points for this - it's the most realistic answer yet!
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
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.
My time estimates will be as accurate as your specs. You stick to the specs, I'll stick to the estimate.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Exactly. Ship date is a feature. It will have lower priority than some features, and higher priority than some other features.
I've never seen a team that could estimate, months in advance, when a particular feature set would ship.
I've been part of great teams that regularly review progress and have the power to adjust priorities.