Estimate Smarter, not Harder

Strategies to help your software development journey

Photo by Dana Cristea on Unsplash

One of the most difficult (and paradoxically time-consuming aspects) of a software developer’s job is estimation.

So how can you do this better, and provide better software with the time you have?

The Background

High-Stakes

When developers make estimates about their work it can affect the success of the whole project, as the Product Owner communicates to the business about the progress of the project.

Agile

Agile is partly about understanding your project estimations aren’t perfect at any snapshot in time and can be iteratively improved. However, you will still invariably be asked about your estimations either for a new feature or refactoring classes. You will probably be held to these estimations, too even if these are relative estimates (more on that later).

The Reasons That Estimation isn’t Perfect

The pressure to perform

A poor estimation can lead to a temptation to work weekends and to make up for “time lost” when in effect the mistake is in the estimation rather than in the execution.

This can lead to underestimation of the time it should take to deliver a feature, or improve some current code.

People struggle with estimation

It is usually only possible to base estimations upon your previous experience. Since new work naturally does not always follow the pattern of previous work, it can be rather difficult. So we can basically say given a large number of variables it is difficult to predict an outcome. No surprise, there.

Inaccurate information

• Scope — The requirements for any project, task, or sub-task are extremely important when it comes to estimation. If the requirements are not fully understood, the business problem is seldom understood and ofcourse, the timeline to complete the work is likely to be inaccurate.
• Resource constraints — There may be meetings that a developer is expected to attend or other…