Ask Slashdot: Are Accurate Software Development Time Predictions a Myth? (medium.com)

New submitter DuroSoft writes: For myself and the vast majority of people I have talked to, this is the case. Any attempts we make to estimate the amount of time software development tasks will take inevitably end in folly. Do you find you can make accurate estimates, or is it really the case, as the author, DuroSoft Technologies' CTO/Co-CEO Sam Johnson, suggests via Hacker Noon, that "writing and maintaining code can be seen as a fundamentally chaotic activity, subject to sudden, unpredictable gotchas that take up an inordinate amount of time" and that therefore attempting to make predictions in the first place is itself a waste of our valuable time?

Comments

Solved problem

[Orgasmatron]

https://www.joelonsoftware.com...

This is one of his blog posts that is almost an infomercial for his product, but he does describe the concept well enough that you could roll your own if you wanted to.

Re:Yes, but...

[bored]

That doesn't work either, unless Bob is familiar with all the details of what need to be done, in which case your just as likely for it to be a "how long bob thinks it will take him" kind of answer.

I have literally seen estimates of "two days" to write a firmware device driver for a network card from a manager that regularly wrote code. In the end the guy that ended up doing it spent close to a year before it reached the level of "just works"

Re:Yes, but...

[computational super]

partly explained by a sort of optimism.

Well, maybe a little, but I think it has more to do with every request for an estimate being something along the lines of, "I'm not really sure what I want, and I need you to estimate it, but the budget only allows for two weeks, so you should probably not say anything more than two weeks." When we're young, this freaks us out, and we try to talk them back from the brink of insanity and get them to see that this is definitely more complicated than two weeks, but they beg, bully and cajole until you break down and agree, certain that you're going to be fired (from your first job!) after just two piddling weeks. So you put together what you can, it doesn't work, two weeks pass, you keep working, nobody fires you, nobody even notices that you slipped the estimate. You keep working on it, the boss keeps asking "is it done yet", you get really good at apologizing and explaining that the network didn't work the way you thought and the new version of the database is different than the old version in undocumented ways, and a few more weeks pass and you get something working, and they say it's shit, and you go back and make a bunch of modifications and they keep asking is it done yet and you keep apologizing, and three months later you actually have a decent working product, and nobody fired you, and the company didn't go out of business because you blew your estimate by a factor of 6 and everybody actually seems reasonably happy.

And then they come you and say "I'm not really sure what I want, and I need you to estimate it, but the budget only allows for two weeks, so you should probably not say anything more than two weeks." And you start to protest, but then you remember last time, so you say, "yeah, sure, two weeks, whatever dude," knowing that it doesn't matter and gradually coming to the realization that you're just playing a game whose rules aren't written down anywhere, pretending that you can deliver anything in two weeks, knowing that they know you can't, but both of you are playing a game of chicken at the end of which nothing happens.

And then after lather-rinse-repeat for 30 years, you go on to slashdot and you tell the young kids, "just give them the number they want to hear, nobody takes estimates seriously anyway" and some loudmouth PHB who figured out how to turn on his computer replies back "they're going to offshore all of you if you don't start producing accurate estimates because there are real-world consequences for missing dates" and you shrug your shoulders and go back to work because you know that the offshore people can't estimate any better than you can and the only people who insist that software estimation is realistic are the people who wish it was realistic, not the ones actually expected to produce it.