[seviu]

I am in a project where we have to give estimates in hours and days.

Needless to say we always underestimate. Or overestimate. Best case we use the underestimated task as buffer for the more complex ones.

And it has been years.

Giving estimations based on complexity would at least give a clear picture.

I honestly don’t know what the PO and TL gains with this absurd obscenity.

[SoftTalker]

The last director I had would ask "is it a day, a week, a month, or a year" he understood that's about as granular as it's possible to be.

And he really only used them in comparison to estimates for other tasks, not to set hard deadlines for anything.

[XorNot]

Knowing nothing else about him, I like him based on this alone.

I've been in planning sessions where someone would confidently declare something would take half a day, was surprised when I suggested that it would take longer then that since they were basically saying "this'll be finished mid-afternoon today"...and was still working on it like 3 weeks later.

[skeeter2020]

This is essentially t-shirt sizing without all the baggage that comes from time. Your boss is trying to use the relative magnitude but it's inevitable that people will (at least internally) do math like "7 day tasks is the same as one week task", or worse over-rotate on the precision you get from day/week/month, or even worse immediately map to the calendar. Suggestion: don't use time.

[fallinditch]

Here's my observation: ballparking an estimate for a whole project, in my experience, tends to be more accurate than estimating each task and adding them together.

I like to think of this as 'pragmatic agile': for sure break it down into tasks in a backlog, but don't get hung up on planning it out to the Nth degree because then that becomes more waterfall and you start to lose agility.

[121789]

Hours is insane. But ultimately time is money and opportunity cost. Software engineering can’t be the only engineering where you ask the engineers how much something will cost or how much time it will take and the answer is “it’s impossible to know”. Even very inaccurate estimates can be helpful for decision making if they are on the right order of magnitude

[zdragnar]

There's two things here that get overlooked.

First, people asking for estimates know they aren't going to get everything they want, and they are trying to prioritize which features to put on a roadmap based on the effort-to-business-value ratio. High impact with low effort wins over high impact high effort almost every time.

Second, there's a long tail of things that have to be coordinated in meat space as soon as possible after the software launches, but can take weeks or months to coordinate. Therefore, they need a reasonable date to pick- think ad spend, customer training, internal training, compliance paperwork etc.

"It is impossible to know" is only ever acceptable in pure science, and that is only for the outcome of the hypothesis, not the procedure of conducting the experiment.

[yetihehe]

I think software is one of those VERY rare things, where inaccurate estimates can actually be inaccurate by "orders of magnitude". After 20 years in the field, I still managed to use 2 months of time on a task that I estimated as 10 days.

[njovin]

The next natural progression of this line of discussion between "the business" and engineering is for them to agree on a time range as an estimate. Engineering doesn't want to say it'll be done in 6 weeks, but they feel okay saying it will take between 4 and 20 weeks so this estimate is accepted.

You can guess what happens next, which is that around week 8 the business is getting pretty angry that their 4-week project is taking twice as much time as they thought, while the engineering team has encountered some really nasty surprises and is worried they'll have to push to 24 weeks.

[lmm]

> Software engineering can’t be the only engineering where you ask the engineers how much something will cost or how much time it will take and the answer is “it’s impossible to know”.

Because it's not engineering at all. But even if it was, plenty of engineering projects are impossible to estimate - the ones that are doing something novel - and disliking that fact doesn't make it go away.

> Even very inaccurate estimates can be helpful for decision making if they are on the right order of magnitude

If what the business wants is an order-of-magnitude, they should ask for that; often (not always!) that's a lot easier.

[Scarblac]

> I honestly don’t know what the PO and TL gains with this absurd obscenity

There are marketing campaigns that need to be set up, users informed, manuals written. Sales people want to sell the new feature. People thinking about road maps need to know how many new features to can fit in a quarter.

Development isn't the only thing that exists.