Software effort estimation is mostly fake research
The issue with estimates are expectations. While nobody acknowledges it, you&#x27;re not actually asked for an estimate, you&#x27;re being asked for a quote.<p>The difference is when you&#x27;re asked for a quote, you&#x27;re asked how much you will be charging, with the expectations that you&#x27;ll be willing to eat into your own margins to give a lower quote. That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s a negotiation, where you negotiate how much extra effort, time and headcount you&#x27;re willing to give, how much tech dept you&#x27;re willing to take, etc., for the privilege of getting their business.<p>If you see it for what it really is, you&#x27;ll see that it works pretty well actually. The business gets more out of you for less to them. It was never about having an accurate timeline or helping with planning or prioritizing, and always about negotiating a better contract with the dev team.<p>Now keep in mind that the &quot;business&quot; in this case is a person who need to report that through their amazing prowess of administration and management, they personally managed to get X feature out during their last review cycle at Y cost with impact Z. This person will not need to deal with developer satisfaction, retention and performance. They will not need to deal with the impact the lower margins they pushed for had on the next feature delivery, or the continued maintainance of the systems. And if the dev team had to lower the quality too much in order to meet the quote they put out, that will be 100% their fault, the &quot;business&quot; will know not to use them for their next contract, or they&#x27;ll expect the dev team to take on fixing all the issues at their own expense once more.