
Do Your Estimates Suck? - alangibson
https://landshark.io/2020/02/12/do-your-estimates-suck.html
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rossdavidh
I applaud the willingness to be open about how bad one's estimates are.
However, I don't think the full significance of the low correlation
coefficient is appreciated here. It's not just that the estimates need to be
multiplied by 3 (or 4 or any other number). The correlation coefficient would
not go up if one did that.

The real lesson is that knowing the estimate, doesn't really tell you much
about how long it will take, regardless of how you modify it. This is
important to realize.

I talk about this more here, in the first section:
[https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/managing_...](https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/managing_software_developers/)

But long story short, the real lesson is not to spend too much time on
predicting, but rather on prioritizing.

~~~
alangibson
> Managers are so deeply prejudiced against the idea that their job requires
> predicting something which is intrinsically unpredictable, that they will
> refuse to believe this regardless of how much evidence is presented

Good quote. The tool I linked to is in part built to provide evidence of the
difficulty of prediction.

> The real lesson is that knowing the estimate, doesn't really tell you much
> about how long it will take

Yes and no. My guess is that most teams can improve their accuracy to some
degree if they track their accuracy over time. I agree in your greater point
of inherent unpredictability though.

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alangibson
Author here. I'd love to hear from anyone that finds the free estimate
evaluator I link to in the article useful.

Here's a direct link for the impatient: [https://without.fail/estimate-
accuracy/](https://without.fail/estimate-accuracy/)

