←back to thread

When did estimates turn into deadlines?

(domainanalysis.io)
318 points alexzeitler | 3 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:03 UTC | HN request time: 1.178s | source
Show context
jph ◴[19 Nov 24 23:24 UTC] No.42189149[source]▶
Estimates are tricky because different manager roles and different personalities bias toward totally different/incompatible concepts of what an estimate actually means. The author's article is conflating realistic and pessimistic estimates:

- Realistic e.g. tech managers and people who favors agile/lean/XP/etc.

- Optimistic e.g. sales managers and people who want to promote.

- Pessimistic e.g. risk managers and people who need firm deadlines.

- Equilabristic e.g. project managers and people doing critical chain

The abbreviation is ROPE, and it turns out to work really well in practice to cover all four bases. My notes are below. Constructive criticism welcome.

https://github.com/SixArm/project-management-rope-estimate

replies(1): >>42189227 #
1. the8472 ◴[19 Nov 24 23:34 UTC] No.42189227[source]▶
Sounds like they need curves (probability distributions), not point estimates.
replies(2): >>42189663 #>>42190303 #
2. senkora ◴[20 Nov 24 00:40 UTC] No.42189663[source]▶
+1. I wrote myself a script that does this with distributions based on my personal time tracking data for doing certain tasks.

More concretely, I sample with replacement N times from the empirical distributions of each step, then sum the steps to get N “samples” from the total distribution.

This is called bootstrapping: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics)

It isn’t too hard to do, and I can confirm that it works reasonably well.

3. skirmish ◴[20 Nov 24 02:27 UTC] No.42190303[source]▶
I once tried to give interval range estimates, the manager said "I cannot work with that, give me a single number". (And when I gave a single number, he said "that is much too long" and tried to negotiate it down to 10 times shorter). Happy to be out of there.