Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners

Tasks that are easiest to estimate are tasks that are predictable, and repetitive. If I ask you how long it'll take to add a new database field, and you've added a new database field 100s of times in the past and each time they take 1 day, your estimate for it is going to be very spot-on.

But in the software world, predictable and repetitive tasks are also the kinds of tasks that are most easily automated, which means the time it takes to perform those tasks should asymptotically approach 0.

But if the predictable tasks take 0 time, how long a project takes will be dominated by the novel, unpredictable parts.

That's why software estimates are very hard to do.

As you say, worthwhile software is usually novel. And to justify our expense, it needs to be valuable. So to decide whether a project is worth doing, we're looking at some sort of estimate of return on investment.

That estimate will also, at least implicitly, have a range. That range is determined by both the I and the R. If you don't have a precise estimate of return, making your estimate of investment more precise doesn't help anything. And I've never seen an estimate of return both precise and accurate; business is even less certain than software.

In my opinion, effort put into careful estimates is almost always better put into early, iterative delivery and product management that maximizes the information gained. Shipping early and often buys much clearer information on both I and R than you can ever get in a conference room.

Of course all of this only matters if running an effective business is more important than managerial soap opera and office politics. Those often require estimates in much the same way they're required from Star Trek's engineers: so the people with main character syndrome have something to dramatically ignore or override to prove their dominance over the NPCs and material reality.

This is so good.