If you’re like me, you’re maybe a jobbing dev taking on contracts and occasionally your own gigs (and by-and-large this works out OK) but maybe yo

The work is never just “the work”

submited by

Style Pass

2024-12-02 19:00:06

If you’re like me, you’re maybe a jobbing dev taking on contracts and occasionally your own gigs (and by-and-large this works out OK) but maybe you secretly hate yourself for being terrible at estimation, and wish you were better at it.

Last year I took on what seemed like a short, easy-to-deliver project, which over the course of a year turned into a kind of “night of the living dead” slog, and because of a variety of factors, had never been easy to estimate.

With the latest phase finally delivered, I wanted to conduct a detailed postmortem to understand why my perception of the actual work was so off, and in the process reevaluate everything I know about assumptions and estimation.

In the rest of the article I’ll deep dive my own shortcomings around estimation, as well as present a framework to plan and visualise estimates, hopefully helping both of us clear those lurking feelings of confusion and guilt.

Add on 30% for project management. I don’t get this at all; firstly, there’s no way I do that amount of project management, and secondly, it doesn’t cover or tackle the real causes of a bad estimate.