Okay, here’s an interesting question: what does an elephant butt, software development and estimation have in common? At first thought not really much, but then again they actually have a lot in common – depending on how you look at it.
Imagine you got blindfolded and placed right behind an elephant, being ignorant to the existence of such an animal. You remove the blindfold, blink a couple of times – and the only thing you can see is a huge grey butt! Wow, that the heck is this you ask yourself wondering. You slowly start moving around the grey butt in an effort trying to understand the nature of the grey mass you’re staring at. Getting to the side, and it’s still somewhat unclear what you’re looking at. Something very big and all grey. Unable to determine the nature of the grey mass – you step back. Suddenly you get enough distance to have the whole creature within your field of vision. And you go: aha that’s what the animal looks like.
So how does this tie into software development and estimates? Actually more than one would initially believe. Any totally new development project presented is like the butt of the elephant. You look at the task delegated and wondering what the heck is this all about. You then start working on the task, doing some research (moving around the elephant), cranking out some code (stepping back from the elephant) – and suddenly you go: aha, that’s what I’m going to build. And at that point in time, is the point in time you actually understand the task and somewhere realize the implications and start getting an idea of the time involved in solving that specific development task.
So that’s all nice and good. You get a task, researching in trying to understand it, doing some limited coding – prototyping until you go eureka! The problem is, that typically you’ll be asked to estimate or at least ball park an estimate upfront. Using the above analogy that’s the point in time someone removes the blindfold and the only thing you can see is one gigantic grey butt. If this is a completely new development task, where you’ll need to research new areas you have absolutely no clue to the implications of the task and can’t even remotely come up with a reliable guestimate on how long it’ll take.
What to do? Well, the only approach I’ve found that works is initially to spell out that you’ll need 30-90 calendar days of pre-project research, fact finding and prototyping prior to offering up any estimates. Depending on the company you work in you’ll find that some companies are completely fine with this, others aren’t. In case of the latter, try using the elephant analogy. If that doesn’t work, well – take what ever estimate that makes sense and add 60 days.
Upon going “aha!”, throw away everything you did, don’t move any research/prototype code forward into the product, as it usually is kind of messy – as you’ll be messing around trying to figure out what the heck you’re supposed to develop.
Claus Jepsen 