Codelinq

In 2007, I left a job where I had to regularly give time estimates and meet deadlines that I defined. I was pretty good at estimating my own projects. In the years since, I haven’t had to give a detailed estimate nor have I had to negotiate a deadline with management or the customer. You see, my project lead was very good at setting deadlines and working with the dev team to get tasks completed on time.

Unfortunately, that project lead now works for Microsoft.

Last week I was asked by management to estimate the hours for the next release and give them a code-freeze date for my features. I decided to back into a number. First I knew that the customer wanted the release delivered very early Q1/2011. Second I knew I was going on vacation the last week of December and wouldn’t be back until Jan 3rd.  So I offered up Jan 15th for a code-freeze, and so the negotiations began.  We finally agreed on 12/24 code-freeze, followed by 12/27 internal testing, 1/7 customer testing and a release sometime after that.

Hmm.. its a good thing I work better under pressure.

Even with ZenParticles, my business partner handles the estimates for the most part. I need to step up and sharpen my estimation skills by helping him and even providing detailed estimates for small tasks at Leaf.

I think there is a much better way to estimate than picking a date out of thin air and negotiating… now to figure out what that is.