What are your experiences regarding project planning and creating hour estimates for new projects? What is the approach you are using, and why has or has it not worked for you? Are there any best practices to take in account? ...
From wikipedia: Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predic...
How do you estimate the time needed to implement a user story? If it's something you had done before you know how long it'll take. But what about if it's completely new to you? How much time do you reserve for "surprises"? ...
I have been working on Flex for last couple of months and as this was the first time I had to actually do Flex I ended up underestimating the project tasks which resulted in a delay. So how does one estimate the project timings when working on a new technology? ...
Some people have suggested that when doing an estimate one should make a lower and upper range on the expected time to delivery. The few project tools I have seen, seem to demand one fixed date. Are there any tools that support this concept of a estimation range? ...
I am using FogBugz as a tool to give us "a look into the future". The program takes our work hours, the tasks for a release, assigned developer's estimate against that task, and the developers tendency to under/over estimate, and tries to come up with a probability of making the release against a range of dates in the future. Now since ...
Reading the XP book, I have a condtradiction in my mind that I cant address and am wondering if you guys can help. XP says write stories on index cards, assign those to a developer, have her estimate how long the task would take and then use pair programming to do the coding bit. So then her and the developer she pairs with must choose...
I'm asking this about smaller jobs: I think that with larger jobs you have all kinds of contractual issues to deal with. With larger jobs, if you haven't contemplated schedule slippage, you're basically hosed. With smaller deliverables (10 hours or less): If you're doing something you've done before, it's very easy to estimate the time ...
My firm just got its first large-scale development project inquiry and I would like to use an Agile process. The client has a vision for the application but openly admits to having very few requirements and recognizes that we will have to charge by the hour. Because of this, I've all but sold him on an Agile approach. The problem is tha...
I am having a difficult time with management asking for estimates on programming tasks that are utilizing 3rd party controls that I have no prior experience with. I definitely understand why they would want the estimates but I feel as though any estimate I give will either be a) too short and make me look bad or b) too long and make me ...
During our iteration planning, we frequently find ourselves in the same position as this guy - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/425044/how-to-estimate-a-programming-task-if-you-have-no-experience-in-it I definitely agree with prototyping before you can give a reasonable estimate. But the same applies to anything that needs a bit of a...
Are there any online repositories of completed real-world projects with their timescales that I can use to callibrate my own development time estimates? ...
Here are the estimates the system should handle: 3000+ end users 150+ offices around the world 1500+ concurrent users at peak times 10.000+ daily updates 4-5 commits per second 50-70 transactions per second (reads/searches/updates) This will be internal only business application, dedicated to help shipping company with worldwide ship...
I often work with sales and marketing types that cannot figure out how to use Excel, let alone understand the scope of their requests from a technical perspective. Of course, it would not be fair to expect them to, but that still leaves me with a problem. What is the best way to show marketing and sales types that they have asked for...
To set the scene - I work in one of those industries that loves estimating and tracking pretty much everything. One of our key metrics is SLOC (source lines of code - declarative and executable statements). We use it for project size and cost estimation, project planning, and many other things. We try to use it to compare apples to ap...
Do you inflate your estimated completion dates? If so why? How much? I tend to inflate mine a little because I can be overly optimistic. ...
I've been using FogBugz's Evidence Based Scheduling (for the uninitiated, Joel explains) for a while now and there's an inherent problem I can't seem to work around. The system is good at telling me the probability that a given project will be delivered at some date, given the detailed list of tasks that comprise the project. However...
I was put in charge of maintaining, alone, a project that I never worked on before, altough I just received this task, and just started to look around the code, management asked me how long it would take to implement some new features and bugfixes. How should I evaluate this, what´s the better approach? Should I evaluate the time to "jus...
A recent project I worked on was proven to be severely underestimated by the architect. The estimate was out by at least 500%. Unfortunately I was brought onto the project after the estimate had been signed off with the customer. As senior dev, I quickly realised that the functional and technical spec. contained some huge gaps and unc...
Whilst answering “Dealing with awful estimates” posted by Ash I shared a few tips that I learned and personally use to spot weak estimates. But I am certain there must be many more! What heuristics to use in the scenario when one needs to make a quick evaluation of software project estimate that has been compiled by a third-party (a col...