alt Hacker NewsBesides the usual unknown unknowns, I've also seen this happen with tasks that involve a lot of coordination in the SDLC. Oh the PR went up at at 2pm PST? Coworkers in EST won't review it until tomorrow. Maybe some back and forth = another day until it clears review. Then QA happens. QA is heavily manual and takes a few hours, maybe with some false starts and handholding from engineering. Another day passes. Before you know it the ticket that took an hour of programming has taken a week to reach production.
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Are we estimating developer cost (investment cost, writing code only tome), development costs (investment costs including QA time), or time to delivery and first use? People want and use estimates for different purposes. You point out great reasons why knowing what the estimates are for is important.
As mentioned in a sibling comment reply:
Time estimations, or conversations to days or other units, typically fail because if a developer says 1 day they might mean 8 focused uninterrupted development hours while someone else hears 1 calendar day so it can be done by tomorrow, regardless of if a developer spends 8 or 16 hours on it.