No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates - and generally speaking humans are better estimators than what most people believe. This seems rather surprising given all we’ve heard about the problems of bad time estimations, projects going overboard, etc and of course, your personal experience with software time estimates. But if people are really bad at estimation, how does that fit with our obvious evolutionary need to make quick decisions based on partial data? if we can’t estimate wel...| The Nukemblog
One of the things that struck me the most when observing managers at work, and in particular newly instated managers, is how managers become more and more out of touch with the realities of work. There’s actually a lot of research on that from quite a bit of different perspectives. Safety research for example has interesting things to say about “work as imagined” and “work as done”. This doesn’t happen over night of course, but rather a slow process - and I found it has a lot to d...| The Nukemblog
Last time, I explained that, although estimating software project timelines is hard, you should do it anyway. With that background, I want to go into some detail and share the technique I use when I need to develop a project timeline. I don’t believe there’s a single “correct” technique; this is one system that works well for me. However, my system does have one critical characteristic that I believe any effective estimation technique should have: it captures both time and uncertainty.| jacobian.org