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Comment by a_wild_dandan | Hacker News Reader

You've perfectly nailed the fundamental issue here.

For many software projects, you simply cannot make meaningful granular estimations for parts of them. It doesn't matter how many story-point poker sessions you hold. Some software work cannot be reduced to a positive integer. In our business scopes creep, bugs plague us, and myriad issues make precise estimations pointless. It's engineering Numberwang.

I get that folks want to tame a chaotic world. But sometimes you can't. And the software engineering field in particular feels wildly neurotic about pretending otherwise. Sometimes I imagine applying our project management tools to other technical fields and laugh at how insane we must look.

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> It's engineering Numberwang.

Can I just say that is the greatest description of software estimation I have ever read? I am 100% stealing that.

LET'S ROTATE THE SPRINT BOARD

We use it internally ourselves. It’s from That Mitchell and Webb Look.

That estimation is hard does not make it impossible. That it may be inaccurate does not make it worthless. Special pleading that our industry is somehow the only one that faces uncertainty and novelty doesn't really hold water.

> "Special pleading that our industry is somehow the only one that faces uncertainty and novelty doesn't really hold water."

I'm sure you're right. I don't think we should abandon all hope. I just think we should be more honest. I also think that software has fewer constraints than other industries, which is a blessing and a curse for estimation

Software is unique because it can be copy pasted. A builder that makes a house in 4 months the first time might estimate 3.5 months for a near identical house. But to deploy the same desktop app on two computers you merely reuse the installer from the first computer, and to recreate the same page in a different app you can copy the code, so no one ever estimates doing the same work twice. Every software problem has at least a little novelty, because if it isn't at least a little different, the work is already done.

>I get that folks want to tame a chaotic world. But sometimes you can't.

No matter how little you know about something you want to estimate, there is an infinite difference between what you do know and knowing nothing. The right thing to do is to represent your knowledge without fabricating it.

Saying "I can't make a point estimate, therefore I can say nothing" is a false dichotomy.

Even if you say, x is between 0.001 and 10^10, you are narrowing things down.

There is a great paper mentioned periodically on HN, where they examined the famous Drake equation and show that when you get rid of point estimates and use reasonable ranges for each variable, the "paradox" that we don't see aliens vanishes. Despite many of the variables having uncertainty of many orders of magnitude.

> Some software work cannot be reduced to a positive integer

I'd take that a step further: if software work can be reduced to a positive integer, you're doing it wrong.

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