
Ask HN: How do you calculate development mandays? - simplelife
Hi there, recently I&#x27;ve been using promodoro to help me focus on my work. I found that I&#x27;m much much more productive.<p>Given a custom CRUD module,I take less than 6 hours to complete vs 1-3 days before using promodoro.. what would be the best way to charge my client based on mandays? Or rather how do you estimate the mandays?<p>I&#x27;ve seen a company charges 5 mandays for a navigation bar, it seems ridiculous to me. Well maybe I&#x27;m wrong, please enlighten me
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baptistem
It really depend on what you include in your mandays.

Here mandays includes exchange with clients. Also 1 mandays doesn't mean 8
hours of work. because in one day you can't work for 8 hours on the same
project.

For the number of mandays, every company have it's own recipe. here is the
"wet finger" for the beginning, then rounded to the next Fibonacci number,
then multiply by the estimate scale of the project. for a navigation bar for
example, with a good code base, it will be 0.5 for code, 0.5 for testing, 0.5
for clients exchange. so 1.5, next Fibonacci number is 2. size of the project
is small aka 1.5 so result in 3 days.

Also notes that imho : going lower than 0.5 is too much details, we fail at
estimation therefore better be safe, giving details will make your pricing
more legit, best advice I can give is to pick little ideas from everyone to
make your own recipe, try and experiment.

About efficiency, Pomodoro is nice but not really natural for me as you don't
follow your own rhythm. I rather turn off every auto-update or notifications.
I check them when I'm available and that my choice, not my notification's
choice.

Make your own way, try and fail, that's healthy :)

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simplelife
thanks! I didn't know you can use Fibonacci in that sense. Will give it a try!

