Estimating

Hofstadter's Law It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

You can, to a certain degree, trade time for more accuracy. Propose that to your manager.

How can we increase the accuracy?

1. Estimate hierarchically, break down tasks until the leaf nodes are 4 hours or less.
2. Use how long similar past tasks took to estimate new tasks.
3. Include time for other work: meetings, code review, writing tests, debugging, presenting, etc.
4. Derisk unpredictable things ahead of time using spikes.