

Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability - stephenjudkins
http://gist.io/6949301

======
proksoup
I dislike doing non-novel things. I dislike being paid for it. If I estimate
accurately, it's probably not novel.

I dislike accurate estimates.

I'll do them, but I'm happy when I do it in 3x the time, not sad. And I
certainly don't feel like I wwasted my time.

I just can't seem to find any employers or customers who feel the same way.

------
swswsw
What the author said is very true. We should accept that there is no good way
to estimate the schedule because each software is inherently new. Simply that
it will be done when it is done.

~~~
ozim
Like software developers would be some fairies living in mystical land? It is
not working that way from other point of view, and that point of view is where
money come from ;)

------
codex
I've seen a trend in HN where the comments from a previous story are cherry
picked by a third party and turned into a blog post, which is then submitted
to HN. It could be coincidence, but it looks like that's what happened here.
The counter-argument is that great minds think alike.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
I'm the author of the gist. The submitter is a good friend of mine that felt
like posting it, and I don't mind.

It was a reply I made to another friend and previous co-worker on twitter a
while back that was talking about software estimation. It wasn't a comment on
any other blog post or hackernews story.

I was thinking I should edit and elaborate on it into a full blog post at some
point, but that would also require setting up a blog ;P I didn't take the time
to write this up to the standards of an adversarial blog aggregation audience.
And I don't care to defend it as such or in detail. It's meant to outline a
broad point I think is true, but not to be ironclad in it's argument.

Anyhow, no cherry picking or anything unethical going on here.

------
gwu78
"Pretty much every piece of technology and algorithm that I use has been known
since the 70's and the only thing I do is hook up those technologies in
various ways to accomplish a goal. To say that it is "novel" or
"unpredictable" is definitely a mischaracterization."

------
toolslive
""" it's likely that adapting old code to a new context is less work than
starting from square one again. """

It has been measured that changing more than 25% of software incurs more than
100% of the cost. So your mileage may vary.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Any chance you remember where that measurement came from? I could use that
with a client right now, given we're discussing a major refactor of about
25%-30% of the code base.

~~~
toolslive
It was mentioned in this talk:
[http://vimeo.com/9270320](http://vimeo.com/9270320) and in the corresponding
book "making software"
[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596808303.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596808303.do)

have fun.

~~~
asabjorn
Have you been able to find the Thomas et al paper that supports this claim? I
have been unable to find it, and others seem to have this problem as well:

[http://www.gdb.me/computing/citations-greg-wilson-
cusec.html](http://www.gdb.me/computing/citations-greg-wilson-cusec.html)

~~~
toolslive
the slides from the talk are here: [http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-
of-evidence-2338367](http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-
evidence-2338367) (see slide 20)

I realized today I got it from somewhere else.. (Facts and fallacies of
Software engineering) Looking up the whole reference in that book gave me the
title, and googling that gave me the the paper

[http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/703/2/CS-
TR-3424.pdf](http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/703/2/CS-TR-3424.pdf)

------
Zigurd
Contrast:

"You mean you _didn 't_ have a complete design for that bridge before you
started building it??"

"You mean you waterfall designed and implemented your YC app project??"

------
droid_w
Theoretically true, but in practice you see millions of programmers doing
"more of the same" and "yet another"

------
ams6110
True for some projects, not true at all for many others. If you build
e-commerce online stores, or other standard sorts of offerings, you may very
well be able to "lay the bricks" in a very predictable amount of time after
you've done a few.

~~~
jkubicek
Having never worked on an e-commerce store or anything like it, do those sorts
of products usually exceed their schedules?

