I will say I think that holding people to estimates is not fair because it doesn’t necessarily correlate with productivity/value added. When asked for estimates my general rule is: take a conservative estimate and double it.
I will say I think that holding people to estimates is not fair because it doesn’t necessarily correlate with productivity/value added. When asked for estimates my general rule is: take a conservative estimate and double it.
I've never, not once, in 30 years of developing software professionally, seen a feature request that was well defined enough to estimate to any level of accuracy. The definitions are always so vague that the answer could range from "this is already done" to "this is not possible". The hard part, and what takes the most time, is always working out exactly what they want - and that's what they want (and expect) an estimate of. "Estimate how long it's going to take you to figure out what exactly it is that I'm asking for."