We should make "estimate" a banned word and replace it with a word like "guess".
Too often what starts out with an off-the-cuff chat about implementing some feature while people are getting coffee with a statement like "Oh I don't think it will be too hard to do this - will take a week tops <filddles with coffee machine />" etc ends up growing its own legs and becomming a gold-plated and irreversible commitment made to a director/VP/CxO somehow. What was a casual guess made without all the information required is now a rod for.our own back. Again.
Perhaps as engineers we should give ourselves a sort of mental style-guide to never ever say the words hours/days/weeks/months/quarters/etc without alarm bells going off in our head and requiring extensive peer review in the same way we do when we're writing "dangerous" code (e.g. user-provided values going in to SQL queries etc) Only half joking really :)
I've tried replacing "commitment" with "forecast" in my team for the same reason. Even though it's an official recommendation [1], the management didn't like it.
We should make "estimate" a banned word and replace it with a word like "guess".
Too often what starts out with an off-the-cuff chat about implementing some feature while people are getting coffee with a statement like "Oh I don't think it will be too hard to do this - will take a week tops <filddles with coffee machine />" etc ends up growing its own legs and becomming a gold-plated and irreversible commitment made to a director/VP/CxO somehow. What was a casual guess made without all the information required is now a rod for.our own back. Again.
Perhaps as engineers we should give ourselves a sort of mental style-guide to never ever say the words hours/days/weeks/months/quarters/etc without alarm bells going off in our head and requiring extensive peer review in the same way we do when we're writing "dangerous" code (e.g. user-provided values going in to SQL queries etc) Only half joking really :)