Seb Rose gave an excellent presentation on the difficulty of providing estimates in the software industry. He debunked some myths, including the shape of Cone of Uncertainty, and recommended several books on the subject for further reading:
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A few other points to take away:
- We are best at estimating small tasks, so split them into 1, 2 or 3 days tasks
- Express estimates as a range with a confidence level – 90% confident that will take between 2-3 weeks
- Communication with stakeholders is most important – assess the impact on upstream and downstream systems
I’ve downloaded the Leprechauns eBook – it’s main intention is to persuade the reader that several views that are taken for granted have not been proven in the literature – such as the Cone of Uncertainty as projects progress (the further into a project, the less error in estimates) and the 10X Programmer (some programmers are ten times more productive).
For what it’s worth, my view on the 10X Programmer issue is that, whilst it’s hard to gather the necessary evidence to compare performance across real world projects, there’s little doubt that some developers add much more value to a project than others. This is true of any human activity – queuing in a coffee shop with a handful of baristas serving while the queue barely moves, it’s usually possible to tell the one person who’s actually getting any work done. On holiday, I watched at a cycle hire place while one guy served at least three times as many families as any other.
It may not be 10X productivity in programming, but a star developer will: eliminate swathes of work by adopting a suitable 3rd party library; consistently check-in code that works (unlike his unproductive colleague who always breaks the build and leaves edge cases untested); produce intuitive user interfaces, reducing the hours of support to train new users.
I have Waltzing with Bears on order – PeopleWare by the same authors was excellent, so looking forward to this one.
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