4 Steps to Make Better Software Development Estimates
How to arrive at an accurate timeline for every new feature in a startup
Many of us have been a part of the above comic. At many occasions, we have thrown a random number in the name of the estimate without having a reasonable execution plan. Here it’s not really just the engineers’ fault. Well, their only fault would be not reading this blog. Just kidding!
In this article, I’ve tried to explain a few easy steps that will ensure you aren’t a part of a similar story again. These steps will help you plan better and come up with more accurate estimates. Let’s jump into these steps right away:
1. Bottom-up!
At early stages in my career, I had worked for a startup, that had an interesting way of estimating any project. They asked me to break down every project into milestones. Milestones are usually smaller features or piece of code that can be released independently. These milestones were further broken down into tasks. Tasks include everything from development, review, testing to deployment. We further break tasks down into granular tasks until we have small chunks that do not take over 2 hours. From here, the final estimate was simply the addition of these 2-hour tasks. At the end of this exercise, I not only arrived at an…
