What do you mean ‘we need more time’? Project schedule estimation in software
As a new grad who has worked a couple different jobs now, some things I don&#x27;t get about this:<p>- What do you do when you don&#x27;t have a spec and when you ask the senior engineer you are working with questions, they don&#x27;t respond or push back against having a spec or a plan longer than the very next feature?<p>- The author says that estimation is easier to do if you are doing something you have done before. What do you do if you are always working with a new framework or language?<p>- How do you break down the steps if you don&#x27;t know what a project entails until you are finished?<p>- What do you do if asked to estimate how long something will take to debug? What if you just started on a project and the error message you are trying to debug doesn&#x27;t make sense? My approach there is to try to understand the system I am working with. If the system doesn&#x27;t have documentation and the existing people on the project don&#x27;t have time to give a walk through of things, I figure that means source diving. However, I&#x27;ve gotten the feedback that I should avoid trying to &quot;understand the universe&quot; when debugging. What can I do to produce accurate estimates of how long it takes to find a bug in a system without spending the time to gain a mental model of the system?<p>- This excercise takes a lot of time. What do you do when asked for an estimate in a meeting rather than over email? What<p>- What do you do if the thing you are building relies on getting an external API to work and that API is either undocumented or is documented in a foreign language? Assume that the google translation is not making sense and this is your first project and you don&#x27;t have a budget to hire a professional translator? This sounds like something you would need to get working before you could actually give an estimate.<p>Why do experienced engineers ask for estimates anyway? Every time I give one I feel like I am lying and I try to warn people &quot;I really don&#x27;t know how to come up with estimates but I am guessing 3 hours&quot;. How do I deal with it when they are upset about it taking a week and a half?