Questions tagged [estimation]
Estimation is the process of finding an estimate, or approximation, which is a value that is usable for some purpose even if input data may be incomplete, uncertain, or unstable.
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How to respond when you are asked for an estimate?
We, as programmers, are constantly being asked 'How long will it take'?
And you know, the situation is almost always like this:
The requirements are unclear. Nobody has done an in depth analysis of ...
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Why do we use story points instead of man days when estimating user stories?
In agile methodologies (e.g. SCRUM), the complexity/effort needed for user stories are measured in Story points. Story points are used to calculate how many user stories a team can take in an ...
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Is there a way to combat Sales perpetually overcommitting? [closed]
I seem to be repeatedly stuck in a situation where release dates are set not based on anything technical, but because someone in Sales has committed to a customer by then. Based on discussions with ...
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Project Manager that wants to lock in time estimate with a signed contract
At a previous employment, a project manager (PM) wasn't satisfied with the delivery time of the code on a project I was on. I was told by my project lead that that the PM was considering having me ...
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Estimating time costs in legacy codebase
Recently I started working on a project where a very old monolithic application is being migrated into microservice-based architecture.
The legacy codebase is very messy ('spaghetti code') and often ...
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Is DRY the enemy of software project management?
One of the most basic and widely accepted principles of software development is DRY (don't repeat yourself). It is also clear that most software projects require some kind of management.
Now what are ...
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What can I do to get better at estimating how long projects are going to take? [duplicate]
I don't want to make life hard for management. I really don't. They're nice enough guys, but every time I am assigned a new project or task and get asked "how long do you think it will take to do ...
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Dealing with awful estimates
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 ...
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Completion time on a company where the supervisors don't know programming [duplicate]
We are in a small company with around 10 developers. I am the team leader and responsible for the development process.
Supervisors and salesmen are close to us since we are a small team, but have no ...
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How to explain to a non-technical person why the task will take much longer than they think? [closed]
Almost every developer has to answer questions from business side like:
Why is going to take 2 days to add this simple contact form?
When a developer estimates this task, they may divide it into ...
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How can you estimate time for tasks which primarily consist of figuring out a problem?
While it is relatively possible for an experienced developer to estimate how long it will take to implement code when the pattern and problem the code is solving is well understood, how can you make a ...
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Scrum - how to carry over a partially complete User Story to the next Sprint without skewing the backlog
We're using Scrum and occasionally find that we can't quite finish a User Story in the sprint in which it was planned. In true Scrum style, we ship the software anyway and consider including the User ...
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How possible is it to estimate time for programming projects? [duplicate]
It seems like it is nearly impossible to get close because you could run into any number of issues and things not first anticipated. How close can we be expected to reasonably estimate? Our PM wants ...
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How to learn to make better estimates? [closed]
I suck at estimates. When someone asks me how long something will take, I don't even dare to make a guess since I will be completely off the mark. Usually I'm way too optimistic, and should probably ...
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How to explain that it's hard to estimate the time required for a bigger software project?
I'm a junior developer and I find it hard to estimate how much time it takes to finish a bigger software project. I know how to structure the architecture in general, but it's hard for me to know what ...
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How can you decide how much detail is it worth going in to when planning a new feature?
I'm a recovering perfectionist.
According to my colleagues, I am also a good software engineer, but one of the feedback I have often received is that I tend to dive too deep too soon.
Suppose I start ...
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How to make Scrum less stressful
I have worked with Scrum in various IT companies on software development projects. This framework has become the standard in several companies, but I have not yet managed to make friends with it ...
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What's the best explanation of what Story Points are?
We're starting to use Story Points here for our Agile development but I find it hard to explain and also can't find any definitive answer to what they are. The best thing I can do is point to other ...
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Am I programming too slow? [closed]
I've only been a year in the industry and I've had some problems making estimates for specific tasks. Before you close this, yes, I've already read this: How to respond when you are asked for an ...
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Boss doesn't believe my time estimate... advice/backup? [duplicate]
I'm working at a startup software company -- 3 developers, less than 15 employees including the CEO. We deal exclusively with Windows Mobile, the .NET CF, and passing the information gathered from our ...
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Why are deadlines always so short? [duplicate]
I'm a junior developer in a small company (in a team of 2 developers). Everytime we are asked to implement a new feature:
the deadline is set so that we just have time to do the development: there is ...
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How do you decide how much your software will cost? [closed]
If you are a solo developer, or have a leading role in a software company, you might have to decide how much your software will cost one or another day... What is your experience with calculating how ...
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What should I do when waiting for a review?
Before asking my question, I must explain the situation.
I'm working for a company as a junior software engineer. One of the seniors always stops me when I have finished my development and want to ...
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Sales Manager: "Why is time-estimation so complex?" [duplicate]
A few days ago a sales manager asked me that question. But at this moment I didn't know a answer which he can understand. He isn't a programmer!
At the moment I work on a product which is over 8 ...
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What to do when time estimation goes wrong?
Let’s say you estimated time for a case to be 3 days.
In day two you notice that the case is growing and new scenarios are popping up which were not counted when the time estimation where done. The ...
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On what basis would you split donation money among your open source team members without any strife? [closed]
I am a developer of an open source project which is hosted in SourceForge.
It started out as a little app then after some releases, it got more and more popular and it started consuming more time and ...
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Encouraging software engineers to track time
How can I encourage my coworkers to track the time they spend resolving issues and implementing features? We have software to do this, but they just don't enter the numbers.
I want the team to get ...
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How to add a new developer to the team
I run a small company composed of only 2 developers. We are building a very big application for one of our clients. Development on this project has gone on for 1.5 years.
Now this client has secured ...
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What is the acceptable error margin when estimating a project duration?
The company where I work is aiming to have a 10% maximum error margin.They expect analysts to not miss the estimate by more or less than 10%.
I don't know what to think about it, since I got nothing ...
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What do you think of "Planning Poker"? [closed]
Planning Poker
Summary, in case you don't want to read the wiki article:
Get a list of tasks you want to do for the upcoming iteration
For each task:
2.1 Discuss with the group what it entails
2.2 ...
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Is it significantly costlier to fix a bug at the end of the project?
In a blog post by Andrew Hay, the following axiom was posited:
It costs significantly more to fix a bug at the end of the project that it does to fix the same bug earlier in the project.
However, ...
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Has research been done on the effectiveness of Planning Poker as an estimation technique?
Although it is a commonly held opinion that planning poker improves the accuracy of project estimations (a small sample of which demonstrated on this question), has any defined research been done on ...
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Should tester's time be included when estimating tickets?
When creating time estimates for tickets should the time taken for testers (QAs) be included in a tickets estimate? We have previously always estimated without the testers time but we are talking ...
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Providing Estimates When working With Unfamiliar Technology?
I was presented with a new problem recently, to provide an estimate for a project in which I must use a framework (and potentially bits of another framework) that I am unfamiliar with. It's much ...
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How to Determine # of Programmers needed for a project
How do you know how many programmers a particular project needs to be successful?
The company I work for fulfills orders for client companies. We have written an in-house warehouse management ...
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Dealing with estimates as a junior programmer
I have been working for a couple of months now in a company that estimates (for the general population, not juniors specifically) tasks and then we are given the task, solve it, it goes through two ...
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Is it Ok to change estimates in the middle of an iteration?
We have started using Agile/Scrum in a team of 4 developers. We did our story estimations and ordered the stories Primed stories in the product backlog.
We started with the point based estimation on ...
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Team is estimating story points, business wants actual time
I'm sure this is not an uncommon theme. We have two scrum teams that are doing an okay job of estimating user stories using story points (the current team constellations are only about 8 months old, ...
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Time estimating of a complex bug investigation (not a straight-forward one) [duplicate]
(It is not a duplicate: Bug investigation is much more non-deterministic than a defined development task where things to be done are specified. Investigation is about narrowing a huge search space, ...
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The Relative Cost Efficiency of (Acceptance) Test Driven Development
I would like to know what the overall impact of resource planning on a software project is, where the requirements and design of the project are driven by automated acceptance tests and unit tests, in ...
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How do you deal with time estimates? [duplicate]
If given too little time, quality suffers. If given too much time, developers will find a way to use all alloted time, no matter what. What would be a good way with dealing with estimates? Are they a ...
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Should individual ability be considered in story points?
My understanding of story estimation has been that one should estimate the size of a story as it would be for an imaginary, average developer — a bit like the "reasonable bystander" concept in law. ...
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Scrum re-estimation of stories
Every day, after the stand-up, my team and I update our estimates for each story. I have a feeling that there is something wrong with the way we do it, so I need your help.
This is how we do:
Story ...
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Maintenance cost of SIMD programming code base
Question:
The software industry's consensus is that clean and simple code is fundamental to the long-term viability of the code base and the organization that owns it. These properties lead to lower ...
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Should you promise to deliver a feature that you aren't sure if its implementable?
In an article from HN, I came across the following advice:
Always tell your customer/user "yes", even if you're not sure. 90% of
the time, you'll find a way to do it. 10% of the time, you'll go ...
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How can I estimate the value of an open-source project?
I am trying to generate a metric for a company cost savings goal. To do this, I want to estimate the savings we realized by using an open source web application rather than building it from scratch or ...
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What are the methods to estimate source code value?
I've been working on some project on my free time for the past few months. Recently I've been approached by friends to build a startup, and this source code would be very valuable to us.
As a co-...
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Is there really a relationship between number of people assigned to a project and the number of defects?
Here is a quote from a training manual at work regarding SLIM and software estimation:
Notice also, there is a correlation between Effort and Defects. This means, the more people there are assigned ...
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Is there a software engineering principle that relates reuse and regression test cost on a production system?
I've worked on a large financial transaction system for a bank that looked after Pensions and Investments. After 15 years of feature changes, the manual regression test cost had climbed to $200K per ...
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Handling "related" work within a single agile work item
I'm on a project team of 4 devs, myself included. We've been having a long discussion on how to handle extra work that comes up in the course of a single work item.
This extra work is usually things ...
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