The mean is misleading.
The median is misleading.
The mode is misleading.
Any reduction of a range of data to a single representative datum is misleading.
However, the fight back against providing something a bit more meaningful than a single value can sometimes be quite strong.
I try hard to provide software estimates as probability distributions, but when someone sees a line with a probability peak somewhere around two days (could be really simple), and then a wide hump somewhere around two weeks (if it's not simple, it will mean a significant rewrite), with a very low line between them and then a long, long tail off to several months, it is not well-received.
I can see their point; they're trying to plan things, and the whole system is set up to work with single numbers. If everyone provided probability graphs for their estimates, and we had a tool that could then combine them and deliver the net probability graph of the combined pieces, I expect they'd be a lot more amenable.
> The mean is misleading. The median is misleading. The mode is misleading. Any reduction of a range of data to a single representative datum is misleading.
For anyone who hasn't seen it before, Anscombe's Quartet is a nice visual of this (and actually goes a bit further, showing reduction in general can be misleading, not just to a single point).
However, the fight back against providing something a bit more meaningful than a single value can sometimes be quite strong.
I try hard to provide software estimates as probability distributions, but when someone sees a line with a probability peak somewhere around two days (could be really simple), and then a wide hump somewhere around two weeks (if it's not simple, it will mean a significant rewrite), with a very low line between them and then a long, long tail off to several months, it is not well-received.
I can see their point; they're trying to plan things, and the whole system is set up to work with single numbers. If everyone provided probability graphs for their estimates, and we had a tool that could then combine them and deliver the net probability graph of the combined pieces, I expect they'd be a lot more amenable.