Early Estimating Is Like Martial Arts
I have been studying martial arts for the past year and a half. I am not great but I am committed.
I was taking a private lesson recently. I have been struggling during drills. While I execute correctly much of the time, each time I execute a move I start analyzing it, even while I am executing the following move.
This proves to be a counter-productive approach. I will often make mistakes in the following move because I am spending all my brain power thinking about what I just did right or wrong.
Estimating can have the same issues. Data from past programs is useful. But we must look forward as well. Differences in technology, requirements, program volatility, developers, and much more make just looking at the past a dangerous proposition.
I recall a magazine that once wrote of SEER, “The journey is its own reward” — meaning that the act of thinking about the program being estimated and understanding the range of issues and opportunities makes the program better and the estimates more viable.
Each estimate should look forward to what the program’s issues will be in addition to looking back to prior programs. Yes, data is important, as indicated in the 10 step process. And so is obtaining some understanding of the range of possibilities of the new system.
The following screenshot from SEER Metrics & Benchmarking illustrates the point. After some analysis, a new system is much more costly than nearly all the systems with similar characteristics. Had we just used data and not done the analysis we would have severely underestimated the new system. The journey is its own reward.
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