Do your best to break tasks up so that all tasks are the same size. Then work on tasks. You'll find a stable average of tasks per amount of time and that will let you forecast how long things will take, how much they'll cost, etc.
That's how you figure out when things will be done.
Some tasks have a high degree of uncertainty. Others don't.
Back when I was using a ruby-on-rails style framework (in PHP) I would frequently get 20 hours of work estimated properly down to 15 minutes when it came to adding simple features to a web application.
If on the other hand you are trying to figure out the gap between what the documentation says should work and what actually works, that is hard to estimate.
That is estimation, in the Scrum sense.
You've described scrum, what you're doing is scrum.
It’s like points aren’t hours, but if I estimate (er, forecast) how many hours it will take, its pretty easy to turn that into points, and vice versa.
I suppose it’s like one of those, “There is no word for it in English, but it essentially means...”
// In my mind you forecast the date of completion, but you estimate the amount of work. It's probably just mindless semantics, after all saying you can estimate the date of completion sounds just as natural, but saying you can forecast the amount of work sounds a bit unnatural.
Literally learning from the past and applying it to the present is “gold plating”?
I’m stunned.
I think the gold plating they're referring to is a form of over-correcting. The learning itself is good, and correcting prior issues is good. But over-correcting and over-learning can be problematic and can lead to gold plating.
I don't think there's any easy indication of the line between the right-amount of correction and over-correction, but I don't think it's unreasonable to state that one can over-correct based on prior experiences.
If, instead, they are 90% ranges (I am 90% sure that this will be done between x and y) then it is much easier to estimate accurately. It is also easier to spot bullshit (if the spread doesn't go up as your time to completion moves further from now, it is probably a bullshit estimate).
Where this still falls apart, for me, is knowing how many hours per day I’ll be able to spend on each project. I have multiple clients, and things come up. This method has gotten me very good at the budget aspect of project estimation, but the scheduling aspect still slips some (it’s rare that more hours in a day become available)