How to estimate your developing time
If you are an engineer, you have bumped into this wall once. I think that this is the most important issue for engineers. We can’t anticipate what is stored in the future, for example, unexpected bugs and errors. However, we have to estimate the time otherwise business team can’t think about their strategy. In this article, I’m going to introduce my way. When I estimated the time for the first time, it was so terrible. However, recently it has been improved. The actual time is almost the same as the estimated time.
Take a note about how long does it take to develop functions
This is the first step. You have to know your skills. You must understand what functions take much time. Take note about your estimation, the actual time, the difference and the cause. In my case, sometimes I developed for four times as long time as I estimated.
Use PREP
This is the solution to this problem. Do you know PREP? This is the way to estimate the developing time. You have to remember a formula which is easy.
“(best time + middle time * 4 + worst time)/ 6”
This is it. “best time” is how long it takes when everything goes well, “middle time” is how long it takes when some goes well, but others don’t go well. “worst time” is anything doesn’t go well(I don’t want it to happen, of course…). In my case, middle time is 2 times as long as best time and worst tine is 4 times as long as middle time. When you estimate your best time, you can use your note. In order to do this, I recommended taking note.
Wrap up
This is the one of a lot of ways, so you can other use measure, but this is so useful for me. If you are at a loss, I recommend this way.
