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Discussion on: A Simple Estimation Exercise

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Joshua Ballanco

While I agree that identifying what will be the difficult tasks ahead of time is a valuable skill that quite often does differentiate Junior from Senior Developers, the concept I'm trying to relate here is subtly different. More than just being able to identify the difficult tasks ahead of time it is equally important to recognize when one of the "unknowns" for a task reveals itself to be the difficult task.

Too often I've seen devs (even very senior devs) or entire teams set off on a "death march" to inevitable failure just because their initial estimate didn't capture the actual most difficult task, and they failed to adequately re-evaluate/re-estimate once they had that additional information.