You are incredibly overstating the efficacy of that "knowledge". It is true that we have a body of research showing that using past task performance as a guide for future estimation is better than most methods. It still has huge error bars, and much of that research wasn't on software development. Software has a rather unique property of only requiring a specific task to be done once, ever. Software development has more in common with the planning stage of other fields than it does with the actual execution of tasks in those fields.
The "Law of Large Numbers" burns people constantly, and those that rely on it fail to understand the self-similar scaling of work and the long tail of distributions.
This "grown up work" is old work that has been shown to be poorly applicable to software development, although I agree it is better than "break thing down into tasks and then use your ego to estimate time for each" which is completely useless. But that is a low bar!
Probably the best I've seen (which was built using some of the research you quote) is Three Point Estimation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_estimation) but that isn't particularly great either, but is an ok mechanism for persuasion!
The "Law of Large Numbers" burns people constantly, and those that rely on it fail to understand the self-similar scaling of work and the long tail of distributions.
This "grown up work" is old work that has been shown to be poorly applicable to software development, although I agree it is better than "break thing down into tasks and then use your ego to estimate time for each" which is completely useless. But that is a low bar!
Probably the best I've seen (which was built using some of the research you quote) is Three Point Estimation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_estimation) but that isn't particularly great either, but is an ok mechanism for persuasion!