alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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
> 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.
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.