Estimating Effort in Software Engineering
08 May 2025
Over the last few weeks, I have been participating in effort estimation for a group web app project I have been participating in. I recorded how long I expected a task to take and then compared it to how long it actually took. Having finished the project (finally), I have learned some things from the experience.
Methods of Estimation
The way I estimated my tasks was almost entirely by feel. If I felt that a particular task was very hard, I might estimate it at an hour or so, and if I thought it was easy I might estimate it for 30 minutes. Tasks that were repetition of something else I had already done I of course estimated to be shorter. Ultimately, my estimations ended up being very poor and I think that this method of estimation is very probably the reason.
So Was There Any Benefit?
To be honest, I don’t think there really was, at least in my case. My estimates were so severely off from reality that it didn’t really help my planning at all. The biggest reason for this was that during certain tasks, inevitably some unexpected bug or problem would come up and it would take an unpredictable amount of time to fix. Things that I expected to take 15 minutes took 4 hours from time to time. Of course, it didn’t matter if my estimation was off, I had to get the task done anyway, and usually there was a significant factor of time.
Recording the Actual Effort
If there was some upside to tracking the actual effort, it was in the small catharsis in seeing the large numbers pile up. It was nice to see a visual representation of how hard I worked on a given task. Other than that, I suppose it showed me that my estimation ability was very lacking.
Tracking My Times
For tracking my times, I mostly just made a mental note of when I started and checked my clock when I finished. In practice, most of my values ended up being rounded to a multiple of 15 minutes. This was not extremely accurate, but neither were my estimations so I do not think this is an issue.
How Much Time Did it Take?
On the bright side, tracking these took almost no time. All the time I needed was however long it took to check the clock two times. Of course, I have to wonder if my lack of results from this is due to my lack of time spent.
No AI was used in making this essay.