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

Posted by BeauHD on from the fact-or-fiction dept.

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?

1 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. This always worked for me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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