As I work on my book, Experience Driven Development, I am compelled to share thoughts.
An important aspect of software development is the estimation of when software features will be complete. I have heard it said that the more you estimate the better you get at it. Is it true?
The estimate for "work" may be different than the estimate for "delivery".
Someone new at estimation may say "I will have the task done in 80 hours". While working on the task he soon finds out that a dependency is not ready and thus he has to wait. Suppose the delay is 40 hours so in the end it took 120 hours to complete the task. It is possible that if you only consider the person's time spent on the task it was 80 hours so their estimate of work was accurate. However the estimate of delivery was inaccurate because he spent 40 hours waiting on a dependency.
I believe that the experience will help the person make a better estimate next time. A better estimate in that it is more complete in considering dependencies.
Now I will describe another scenario. Suppose someone estimates that their feature will be done in 80 hours. There are no external dependencies. In reality suppose it took 100 hours to finish the feature. In this scenario the reason it took longer than estimated was because it was a new task and the person had never done anything quite like it before. In my opinion this kind of estimate will not improve. I do not think you can get better at predicting the unknown. What has happened is that the person has gained new experience and if that person encounters a similar situation in the future then he can estimate how long it will take to develop the familiar "parts" and add some amount of a guess to the estimate for the unfamiliar parts.
Experience improves estimates.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment