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Estimation seams hard because of two reasons.

1) Very few individual contributors responsible for providing estimates ever invest the time necessary to learn how to perform estimation.

2) Many stakeholders (managers, PM, etc.) do not know the definition of the word estimation.

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One of the key things with this is differentiating between the word "estimation" and the word "committing". I'm not sure if it was Uncle Bob's book (The Clean Coder), or another one, but those two words are frequently misunderstood by everyone involved.

An engineer's "estimate" is a project manager's "commitment", unless there's a serious discussion about what the probability of completion there is associated with the estimate. (The default assumption will be 100%)

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