Everyone wants meaningful #estimations. Rarely are estimations meaningful. Estimations become more meaningful the further along the delivery one is. Early it’s a crapshoot and usually wrong. Estimations and fortune telling have more in common than you might expect.
So sure, we can do estimations. The questions are: when and with which level of information? How much confidence do you want in estimations? And let's ignore non-answers such as “as high as possible” because then the answer is that we do an estimation in the last week of delivery because that’s when confidence is the highest.
For me personally "meaningful" begins after technical planning. That is when the team sat down and actually planned out the work. It’s still _imagined work_ at that point - so dragons are still abundant - but it’s a good enough basis to give an educated guesstimate. Before that it’s reading tea leaves. Of course we can do it earlier but then the range (best vs worst case) will vary wildly. If that’s meaningful enough, great. If not, then that’s shit but nothing we can really do about it, unless someone on the team has a working crystal ball stashed away.
Estimations are one of these things were people love to confidently give wrong answers. It’s a self-perpetuating myth that’s largely done because it was always done and because it gives the illusion of control. Maybe that’s good enough? The illusion?
#SoftwareEngineering #Planning #Tech #TechLeadership #TechMyths #Bullshit
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