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#noestimates

I fucking hate doing estimates. It stresses me out. I just did it, for a requirement about migration. I'm on my way to a fight now with the PO, because "the estimated time is too long". There was an agreement that deliverables were not to have extensive documentation and unit testing will only cover 30% of each use case (I know, stfu), but that's gone so I have to do the whole thing. I estimated 160 hours coding time, 40% of that for docs and 50 for testing. I'm standing by it.

All that stuff aside, what bothers me the most about estimates is that there's lazy motherfuckers who say shit like "I can have their RESTful ws in 2 days, but I said a month, because fuck it" and generate a win-win situation for them and their company, because the client - practically everytime - will just argue for the task to be completed in barely 10% less of the estimated time, accept the proposal and be happy waiting, the developer will fucking dawdle and the company will be paid for more hours than it deserves. Ugh.

Fuck estimates.

Comments
  • 2
    Oh, my process... Like I partly mentioned in the rant:

    - Make sure I get what the client wants or (ideally) have them mail me the detailed reqs. (easy when not dealing with difficult people).

    - Take a whole day to compare the current task to a previously finished similar task and estimate based on that. If there's no predecent, break into blocks, analyze each meticulously and estimate my building time.

    - Add 50% of the building time for testing and 40% for writing docs.

    That's it.
  • 0
    @telephantasm Thabks for sharing, especially the multipliers. They look reasonable. ;)
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