Estimates only work for tasks where almost all of the "pieces" are known (Building a house, Building a bicycle, etc...). In software tasks are regularly not fully defined or are misunderstood based on the information supplied. This means that any estimate has to be based on a prediction of the sub-tasks and the effort involved to execute those tasks.
If my personal estimations were gunpowder, I wouldn't be able to blow my nose!
The only possibility to create a reasonable estimate is to document the sub-tasks that are known and then estimate them, and finally add some prediction for unknowns to that total. The documentation of the sub-tasks also helps to make it more clear as to what work is being done so if there are any major misconceptions they can be found as early as possible.
Nothing beats revisiting of the estimations against actual work performed to see how well the estimates were derived. The problem usually becomes that the estimates were wildly wrong and the customer is expecting the original delivery date.
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Estimates only work for tasks where almost all of the "pieces" are known (Building a house, Building a bicycle, etc...). In software tasks are regularly not fully defined or are misunderstood based on the information supplied. This means that any estimate has to be based on a prediction of the sub-tasks and the effort involved to execute those tasks.
If my personal estimations were gunpowder, I wouldn't be able to blow my nose!
The only possibility to create a reasonable estimate is to document the sub-tasks that are known and then estimate them, and finally add some prediction for unknowns to that total. The documentation of the sub-tasks also helps to make it more clear as to what work is being done so if there are any major misconceptions they can be found as early as possible.
Nothing beats revisiting of the estimations against actual work performed to see how well the estimates were derived. The problem usually becomes that the estimates were wildly wrong and the customer is expecting the original delivery date.