Let's face it, creating estimates for tasks is not an exact science. Whether it is points, hours, level of effort, or whatever else the next fad is, it all mostly boils down to what feels like a shot in the dark. Join my session to find out a few lessons learned, tips, tricks, and strategies for creating accurate and timely estimates on your developer tasks. I'll share my experiences for creating the majority of estimates at my company for the past 17 years. I'd estimate that the amount of estimates I have created is more than 500 or so ...see what I did there? At the end of the day, if you can create better estimates, than maybe your project managers will end up becoming another one of your long time friends.

1. How To Win Friends & Influence…
Better Developer Estimates
By Brian McKeiver
#prairiecode

2. Why Are We Here
1. Why does estimation matter?
2. How can we estimate tasks?
3. Have some fun.
By the way I need 2 volunteers

3. Six ways to make people like you
• Become genuinely interested in other people.
• Smile.
• Remember that a person's name is to that
person the most important sound.
• Be a good listener. ...
• Talk in terms of the other person's interests.
• Make the other person feel important – and do
it sincerely.

5. Why Do We
Estimate?

7. HOW LONG DOES IT
TAKE?

9. Good Estimates Possible?
This @exxonmobile chart
from 1982 predicted that in
2019 our atmospheric CO2
level would reach about 415
ppm.
Raising the global
temperature roughly 0.9
degrees C.

10. Earth crossed the 415 ppm threshold May 11th 2019
and broke 0.9 degrees C in 2017.
(source)

11. How Does this Connect to Winning Friends?
PMs / Business people / Stakeholders all want to feel like
they can control and influence getting things done.
They make business plans and schedules based from Level
of effort
Someone somewhere needs to see a pretty chart, right?

13. How We Make Estimates
In software development, effort estimation is the
process of predicting the realistic amount of effort
(expressed in terms of hours, complexity points, or
money) required to develop software based on
incomplete, uncertain and noisy input.

15. Why It’s All Bullshit
Where the Stories are made up,
and the Points don’t matter.

16. How Long Does it Take?

17. Is There a Better Way?

18. Let’s Try an Exercise

19. Headless
CMS

23. Volunteers?

24. Actual time: It took the
developer about 8 hours
to complete this

25. Where to Start:
Did You Break it Down?
Can you componentize it?
Split it into separate pieces?

26. Navigation
Jumbotron
List of Articles
How Many Others?

27. Do You Know Enough?
It’s ok to say: “I don't know”
“Give me X hours to research it.”

28. Factors of a Good Estimate
• Listen to your “Gut” (first impression matters)
• Type of task (read-only vs add/edit, listing vs detail page?)
• Complexity level (integrations or no integrations?)
• Experience (have you done it before, have others?)
• Attention to detail (did you capture all requirements?)
• Is there a Vendor involved (what kind of response time?)
@mcbeev

29. • Is it new technology (bleeding edge vs tried & true?)
• What does your estimate include (just dev time?)
• Estimates are not transferrable (one dev to another)
• Document how you came to it (spreadsheets, yes!)
• Crowdsource for input (ask your team / mentors)
• How much Context Switching (are you on 1 task or 10?)
@mcbeev
Factors of a Good Estimate II

30. Make Better Estimates: My “Half-live” Method
Pick a number
that seems
ludicrously high,
and ask…
Can you do it
in X hours ?

31. Half it, or Not…
Can you do it in 80 hours?
Can you do it in 40 hours?
Can you do it in 20 hours?
Repeat, until confident answer
I can in 24 hours

32. The $64,000 Question
Does it Really Work?

33. 175%
150%
125%
100%
75%

34. Don’t Ignore History
Go back and check
your estimates.
Consistency matters
a lot in this equation.

36. Happy PM == Happy Work Life
Cheesiest picture I
could find of people
working together.
Definitely a PM 

37. Closing Point
Takeaways
1. Try out my Half-life method for estimating next time.
2. Review the “Factors of a Good Estimates”.
3. Be Consistent and your teammates will appreciate it.

38. Questions?

39. Brian McKeiver
Co-Owner & Kentico MVP, BizStream
Web: www.bizstream.com
Email: bmckeiver@bizstream.com
Twitter: @mcbeev
Blog: www.mcbeev.com
GitHub: github.com/mcbeev