We are at the half-way point in this series and I thought I’d try to fit in this post while I wait for my 9GB of Halo 5 updates to be downloaded to my XBOX. Experience and Understanding the Problem are two of the four pieces to being good at estimating what you are trying to do.  The third?  Knowledge. You might say – “Well isn’t experience knowledge?” – no it’s not, experience is the…

Continuing on our this very recent series of Software Estimation where we first talked about Experience, now we are going to turn our attention towards the answer everyone says when their estimation is off the mark; I didn’t understand the problem How simple is that, understand what you are building?  When you think of a house being built, how much effort goes into the ground before a drop of concrete is poured?  Soil samples, digging…

Ask anyone in any field how long it takes to accomplish a task and you would hopefully get something of a straight-forward response in a decent amount of time.

Ask a Software Developer how long it takes to code X and you’ll probably be graced with a number of questions that could include, but not be limited to;

• Have I ever worked on this component?
• What language am I using?
• Do I know this language?
• Is this a hard problem?
• Do I know the platform?
• Do we have requirements?
• Is this a high-priority?
• When does it need to be done?

And the list can go on… and on… and on… you get the point though – estimation in software development is not an easy thing to do.  This topic is much too large for one post, so I’m going to break it into a few sections for this week, the first being Experience.

I’ve blogged about taking something complex and making it simple before (and half a million others  have as well so its good we’re all on the same path) but beyond that I am a big believe in the install and a user’s first experience with your “thing” – product, device, software, hard drive, et al – is a lasting impression. Today, I was looking to install Wordpress on Windows 2012, knowing I’d need MySQL and PHP…

Years ago I attended my very first technical conference, SqlPass.  I was only a DBA for a few months at the time and it was a very last minute adventure.  I would spend the next 3 days at this conference becoming inundated with all things SQL Server surrounded by peers who had been doing this for much longer (I had only been a DBA for 3 months). The only session I remember from that event was this…