I was contacted this week by an old acquaintance, and he had a proposition for me.
"Hey, I hear you're a programmer! That's great, because my buddy and I have
this idea for a business. We have everything important figured out, and all we need is a programmer to throw
That’s an interesting way to start the estimation. My first thought was ‘no way’, but then I thought more about it and I agree more and more. I’d bet that you get a lot of push-back from people when you use that estimate, especially those who don’t understand what goes on behind the scenes.
That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that it triggers people into a negative reaction.
I never had to use this estimate in front of a client, but if I had, I would decompose it first before giving the total estimate. If there is about 10 items to do per button, so 10 buttons would be a hundred complexe tasks. So let say that it take an hour per task, but since we are fast we can do 10 a day. So suddenly 10 working days, or said otherwise 2 weeks don’t seems unrealistics for this apparently simple 10 buttons task.