Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
Here's my beef with estimates.<p>I can give you a really really accurate estimate, but in order to do so we're going to have to spend a lot of time going through the request, building and verifying actual requirements, designing the solution and then validating it.<p>The process will require dev resources, business resources and probably people from the support team and will take a lot of time.<p>I'm happy to do it. It's actually my favorite part of the job. But the business invariably doesn't want to spend the time and money to do that.<p>They'd generally much rather start with a fairly vague description of what they need and let the devs keep throwing stuff against the wall and see what sticks.<p>Good and accurate estimation is not just a dev function. It requires buy in and input from the entire business stack.