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

This always worked for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your developer's estimate
Increase that by 40%
Double that

It seems incredibly arbitrary, but I have learned that the 40% covers testing and implementation, while doubling the entire amount allows for the customer seeing the first result and _then_ telling you what they really want.

Try it, you'll like it

Re:Yes, inherently unpredictable, needs percentage

[networkBoy]

This:
I always provide my managers with confidence interval estimated times
50% 10 days (assumes *nothing* goes wrong, no interruptions, and high code reuse)
90% 15 days (assumes no catastrophic issues, no interruptions > 2 hours and only 5 of them, moderate code reuse)
100% 55 days (the wheels fell off, severe schedule impacts of interruptions non stop, no code reuse)

My boss laughed at my 100% estimate until it actually happened.
A lead dev (who could be counted on for sound advice delivered in a belittling way) was struck down by lung cancer and ceased to exist. Another lead dev who was even brighter, and much nicer to work with was poached by a competitor, both within days of each other. The code was cutting all new territory in the system, so maybe 15% reuse? *and* some panicky manager started having $deity damned _daily_ meetings about it.

We almost missed my 100% date, made it by about 16 hours.

Re:Each dev consistently off by a constant factor

[vlad30]

Developer’s and programmers have relatively poor time estimation skills. The one thing that makes them good is focus and getting lost in a problem often getting lost in the work and waking from this extreme concentration days later not realising how much time has passed and only counting the final Eureka moment where the programming was quick. Then when asked next time for a expected time they estimate the perceived time of hours not days or weeks.