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Discussion on: As a lead engineer/manager, what steps can you take for your team to provide better estimations for their tasks?

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tandrieu profile image
Thibaut Andrieu

Depend on the project.

On heavy legacy software, estimation are really hard because when you touch something, everything may collapse. So there are a LOT of unknown. For this kind of project, I use to create a "ponderation sheet". For ex., when touching this module, when implementing this kind of feature, or when facing this kind of complexity (multi-thread, multi platform, etc...) we know we should ponderate the initial estimation by *1.5, *2, *3, or add an uncompressible time like +2 days. It is completely arbitrary and based only on experience, but it works.

On younger project, you can use estimation in T Shirt size, points or whatever. This generally translates by "does it take 1 day, 1 week or 1 sprint ?". If it is more than 1 sprint, split the story until doable in 1 week.

And as a rule of thumb, "You cannot put 12L in a bucket of 10L". So if it takes 2 days, it takes a week.

I also wrote an article concerning large project estimation. Hope this can help : kissyagni.wordpress.com/2022/04/11...

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dollardhingra profile image
Dollar Dhingra

Thanks for article :)