How do you estimate time

OriginalGriff

Nope - stealing my numbers is plagiarism, not slander!

Lost User

You are joking right

My Name in English[^] Translation done By OriginalGriff

Lost User

A slightly serious answer. Split it down into easily manageable task. Estimate each task. If the estimate is less than 1/2 day, round up to 1/2 day IF the estimate is greater than 2 days, split it into smaller tasks. Add the total. Multiply by 2 if I am doing it, or three if someone else (not because I am better but because there needs to be additional time for them to interpret, and for contingency if I missed anything) Round up to the nearest week or day depending how big it is. Add a couple of days for contingency. Present the estimate. Be prepared to negotiate. Note my time as I develop against each of the tasks - so next time I will be able to estimate better.

MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')

OriginalGriff

My lawyers will explain it all to you when they arrive. Shouldn't be long now...

Lost User

I'm out of here bye. Will deactivate my account :~

My Name in English[^] Translation done By OriginalGriff

OriginalGriff

You fed up with the Muslim Brotherhood already? :laugh:

Lost User

Evidence Based Scheduling[^] :)

Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

Amarnath S

Do a Work Breakdown Structure[^]. Estimate each item individually, and total them up. Add a buffer (10 or 20 percent, depending on experience). In an agile project, you can follow Planning Poker[^].

Marc Clifton

محمد م. محمد wrote:

How do you estimate time fir writing code?

There's the fundamental flaw. A time estimate needs to include more than just "writing code". Documentation, debugging, unit testing, feature testing, QA testing, rewriting... So, break your requirements down into smaller chunks, recurse (and I do mean, re-Curse) until you feel like you can confidently make an estimation and if you can't, refine the requirements further. Then for every 10 hours of code writing, factor in: 1 hour for documentation 1 hour for debugging 3 hours for testing (unit, feature, QA) 2 hours for rewrite based on requirement changes and problems resulting from testing and having to update the tests and docs. For every 500 hours of coding estimates, multiply the above additional factors by 2 to compensate for increasing complexity. Marc

Day 1: Spider Database Navigator Unit Testing Succinctly

Marc Clifton

Eddy Vluggen wrote:

Evidence Based Scheduling[^]

That's a great article. Thanks for sharing! Marc

Day 1: Spider Database Navigator Unit Testing Succinctly

PIEBALDconsult

I try not to give an estimate, but when pushed I say they should add six months to my estimate. This is based on experience, twice on a former job I gave an estimate: In the first case, it turned out that a few systems we had been using turned out not to be Y2K-compliant so we had to get new systems, I had to learn to use them, and alter our code to use them. In the second case, I thought that I could just drop some code into a new client's codebase (just as I always had), only to find that they were not using OpenVMS and Oracle PRO*C, but had instead opted for Windows NT and SQL Server (with ODBC X| ).

Matt U

I'm actually glad you asked this question. This will help me as well. I've never been able to honestly estimate time. When I started working for the client I'm with at the moment, they repeatedly ask about how long I think some things may take, and I never really have an answer.

djj55: Nice but may have a permission problem Pete O'Hanlon: He has my permission to run it.

Thomas Daniels

Please ask the admins to re-activate your account; OriginalGriff was just joking, as he said here[^]

The quick red ProgramFOX jumps right over the Lazy<Dog>. My latest article: Create an HTML5 (and JavaScript) Maze Game with a timer My group: C# Programmers Group

Lost User

Tell him you do agile development now and the first iteration is 2 weeks.

RTek23

محمد م. محمد wrote:

I'm out of here bye.

O.G. :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: Unfortunately, the lad must live in a rather oppressive part of the world...either that or does not understand Welsh humour (not that anyone really does, but I digress :-D ) Ken

Clodetta del Mar

i thougt 50. using your formula i calculated 156... now i´m thinking about the measure... is it minutes, hours or what? :^) finally, i chose "days"... quite relaxing for me, but not for the Manager... :-\

Clodetta del Mar

+5 :thumbsup: great article.... whenever i was asked how long does x take i felt like i´m having my back on the wall... :| X| :~

Lost User

Clodetta del Mar wrote:

is it minutes, hours or what?

Yes, of course. ;)

Veni, vidi, abiit domum

Simon ORiordan from UK

When I was working for a machine tool company in Dorset, we were all trained in the Carnegie Mellon University 'PSP' scheme. PSP stands for Personal Software Process. During the course we wrote our own statistical analysis apps and applied them recursively to the work. The PSP yielded lots of very interesting stats about our individual performances, but in particular it revealed nuggets such as spending more time on detail design reduced bug fixing, particularly in testing phase. Testing bugs take (if I remember) 5 times longer to fix than Compile bugs. In addition to exposing and improving the way you work, PSP builds a database of your performance which is your property(between jobs too), and provides a statistically significant estimate of future performance of jobs. You can use this to provide management with a probably accurate estimate. If you're really serious about this, I'd recommend:cool: PSP.

R Erasmus

The project manager is going to always divide by 2 so I always times by 2.

"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." << please vote!! >>