Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
Here's my beef with estimates.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.The process will require dev resources, business resources and probably people from the support team and will take a lot of time.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.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.Good and accurate estimation is not just a dev function. It requires buy in and input from the entire business stack.