Software Development Estimates

Working on software often requires some estimation of how long tasks will take, but often these numbers are nothing more than gut feelings. I propose we look at the length of the development iteration cycle in order to provide estimates instead of “that seems easy”.

Development iteration cycle is writing code and testing it. The length being how long that process takes. On some projects, it can be 10+ minutes. On other projects it can be milliseconds. Now, using this time as a basis for estimation, I propose that 1 minute of development iteration cycle time is equal to 1 day of work. Something like this.

I think this can scale up and down and maybe could extend into “how many development cycles can I execute in a time frame and how many development cycles will this take to get right?” Then of course add some numbers for the complexity of reviewing, merging, and deploying.

Maybe this needs even more math.