Ask HN: Agency developers, how do you estimate time accurately? - Grangar
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gerlv
Most likely you won't be able to estimate project accurately. I've co-founded
a digital agency, and after 5 years we still can get 100% accuracy.

But here are few things that will impact the accuracy:

\- how familiar are you with the technology \- how quickly the dependencies
change (tech dependencies). \- how technical your project manager is - you
will likely to spend more time in the meeting explaining some trivial stuff if
PM isn't technical. \- how many visual design revisions you need to implement
during this estimate \- how big is the task - if it's bigger than 2 days your
accuracy drops.

My advise is to keep the tasks small, no more than 2 days (3 days or 20 hours
max). And total phase smaller than around 200 hours. You also need to make
sure that everyone is on the same page - if there is no good communications
your estimate might need to be revised during the development phase.

Even if you implement the same project the second time - it still not
guaranteed to be faster than the first project.

