The thing I dislike most in software development is when they ask me to estimate how long a given project will take. I am about to start a new project so of course the first thing that is asked for is to do some research and try to figure out what the high level tasks of the project will be and estimate how long they will take. This seems like a reasonable thing to do as obviously if the company is going to invest a lot of money into a project they want to have sort of a guess how much the project is going to cost. Additionally if the scope of the work is outside the time frame in which they need the feature they can decide whether or not to limit the scope of the project or add resources to the project. So all in all I can see the need and the point of it, but I think I dislike it cause I am not very good at it.

The first project I led at my current company I came up with a bunch of estimates and actually did a pretty good job of identifying the major areas of work that needed to be done. I went through and applied my time estimates and based on the features I felt I understood very well I delivered fairly tight estimates and the features I had less understanding of I added extra padding for research and learning time. Then I got into the project, and the parts I thought I had the biggest handle on was actually much bigger than I had realized. I had I think 2 weeks of work on one aspect that actually ran like 6 weeks. I believe the whole project was a 3 month project. So of course the project manager was sweating it a little bit. I told him don’t worry I always hit my dates and if I think the date is in danger I will let you know immediately. As we went on the other aspects that I didn’t feel like I understood as well turned out to be easier than expected and I made up the time there. By the end of the project I delivered on the exact date I had promised 3 months previously and I didn’t put myself into a death march so I considered that a successful project. From an estimation point though maybe it was a failure as all my estimates were off even though I delivered what they wanted when they wanted it.

So here I am again working on an estimate for a new project wherein the date is already known. I guess at this point my thinking is make sure I have a decent enough understanding of the project so that I have the resources to hit the date, and hopefully the experience of that first project will help me to not be too aggressive on the parts that I think I understand as there are probably some icebergs and also not too lax so that at the end I deliver on the date we need it or a week or 2 early and have enough resources to do so that I am not in a death march. Wish me luck.

On a positive note I resolved all the issues with our new SonarQube server instance and we transitioned to it last Friday. We are now able to use the plugin in IntelliJ to download the data and analyze our local projects which is a big step forward. Additionally running it as one unified Sonar job from the parent pom instead of invoking it on each maven module has resulted in a speedup by 10 minutes on our builds with Sonar analysis and better Sonar coverage overall (Previously some taglib libraries and a few other small things weren’t being analyzed).