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Sweet talker but Incompetent colleague/team lead has given estimate of 350 story points (1point =1day) i.e more than an year and half, for one module to refactor. Worthless manager seriously considered to proceed with these estimates and ready to accept proposal.
When presented these numbers/estimates with wider audience, one senior engineer reminded everyone that module was developed few years back, in <2 months by 3 engineers.
Shame shame!

Comments
  • 8
    Dumb, but he is better than those annoying leads underestimating the effort without consulting the developers
  • 2
  • 2
    @asgs I think I'm with you. Better to have more time than suffer the crunch(if any) for having too little
  • 7
    Maybe it's spaghetti code if it was developed by three peeps in 2 months?
  • 3
    Better to over estimate and under promise, then to underestimate and over promise. It always look better when you deliver in less time, and you actually have an opportunity to do it right.
  • 6
    To be entirely honest the time used to develop something is not a good metric.
    I will provide an example:
    Alice is pressed for time and develops the module in a terrible way.
    Bob's project depends on Alice's module and so he has to introduce behaviour to account the silly things Alice did. Maybe that dependency is even the reason Alice was so pressed for time because she could not delay Bob's deliveries.
    After a year Charlie has to refactor Alice's module. Charlie realizes that if he removes the silly behaviour in Alice's module he could break Bob's module. Charlie realizes that this is a big issue, now this refactor could rake more time than just creating the module correctly the first time around because there are now hidden "features" (read: horrible hacks) to maintain.

    Tl dr: sometimes refactoring costs more than development. Don't be prejudiced, try to understand the issues considered in the estimates. And demand those issues to be explicit, an estimate is not just a number.
  • 0
    @irene no it doesn't, but I don't want anyone to assume "he" by default, when it's actually "she". I'm trying to put correct words, if that appears to be sexist, it's not something I can fix. Incompetence isnt gender biased, but would like to call a Spade ás Spade, atleast when im anonymous.
  • 0
    @polaroidkidd even if it's a bad code, forget about refactor, even rewriting shouldn't take that much time as we've decent test coverage.
  • 0
    @irene I don't understand, I just wanted to tell the fact. It's up to the world how they want to interpret. It may be a pointer to you, fine but I just want to clarify that part.
  • 0
    @Pickman agreed, but in this specific case, afaik, none of the extended team sees such complex dependencies. Worst part here is, these is no real justification for 350 story points.
  • 0
    @Pickman @Alice, why would you do that?
  • 0
    @MightyCutie demand the justification before judging but then do judge.
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