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?"

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[Futurepower(R)]

Funny and true quotes from the parent comment:

"One of the major terms in the non-linear politics is who gets the blame when a product shipped with working functionality proves impossible to extend in the next coding iteration because the wrong foundation was chosen. Do you want the estimate consistent with my professionalism, or with grenades baked in for the next guy to work on this?"

And: "Some day I would love to seal my estimate into a cryptographic vault on the basis that my estimate is only correct if I don't tell anyone. As soon as you tell someone, that person immediately goes around changing the assumed conditions."