The Longflow Manifesto
&gt; In the software development world, it is impossible to produce meaningful estimates, let alone precise ones, for anything but nano-tasks.<p>Why is the notion of this repeated so often? It&#x27;s not _impossible_ to differentiate between tasks that take a few hours, a few days and a few weeks, where such estimates are useful enough to make business decisions (e.g. how much to charge, if the time&#x2F;benefit is worth it). Sometimes you&#x27;ll go over and sometimes you&#x27;ll go under in your estimate but an estimate is meant to be a ballpark figure to help make decisions. I track my estimates and actual time when bidding on fixed price projects and I don&#x27;t find it hard to be pretty accurate; of course it helps if it&#x27;s a project that&#x27;s similar to something you&#x27;ve done before though.<p>To put another way, if a manager is trying to decide how much to charge a client for a project or is trying to decide which of two new features has the best cost&#x2F;benefit ratio, what do you expect them to do if engineers can just say &quot;I will not provide any estimates because estimates are impossible&quot;? Every industry uses estimates and estimates are expected to be a ballpark figure only.