How do you estimate time

OriginalGriff

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

Lost User

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!! >>

Jorgen Andersson

Yet another reason to get FogBugz

Politicians are always realistically manoeuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers. Buckminster Fuller

Stefan_Lang

Clodetta del Mar wrote:

is it minutes, hours or what?

All of them: 156 hours, 156 minutes, and 156 "what?" (although I'm sure your manager will helpfully provide most of those ;) )

GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)

Stefan_Lang

Thanks for mentioning this. I have made lots of estimates over the years but am still not very good at it. I've never tried actually analyzing the data though - will look at this shortly.

GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)

Fran Porretto

My technique isn't too far from that:

Take a wild-ass guess at the time it would take if I were certain the requirements were firm and that there would be no interruptions while I'm working on it;
Double the number;
Promote the unit to the next higher value.

So if I figure I could knock it out in an hour under "ideal" conditions, I estimate "2 days." If my wild-ass guess is two weeks, I submit an estimate of "4 months." And so forth.

The remarkable thing about this approach, which I first suggested as a gag of sorts, is that it's proved to be pretty reliable in practice -- seldom more than about 10% from the actual time required, and never more than 25% off. Somehow it accounts flexibly for requirements changes, imposition of unanticipated constraints, distractions and interruptions, and acts of God. There's a lesson in there, somewhere...

(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)

Marius ten Napel

(MyEstimation + 15%)*2, well, ±...