My Washing Machine Refreshed My Thinking on Software Effort Estimation — Cosive.
I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
Read in full here:
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Enjoyed this one.
A neat gem in there:
As I was thinking about it the next day, it reminded me in a very physical form why a lot of why software development estimation is so hard. So often we’re asked to build something we’ve built before, so we estimate with confidence that it might take a week.
What we fail to factor in is that while 90% of the project will be the same, there’s going to be one critical difference between the last 5 projects and this project that seemed trivial at the time of estimation but will throw off our whole schedule.
Sadly I like many others still hate software development estimation.
