Cutting Through the Cone of Uncertainty
What is software development effort estimation?
In most cases: A guess based on unrealistic draft list of requirements, using inconsistent methodologies, made at the moment of maximum ignorance, by people who are always optimistic about their own abilities, squeezed down by managers who think they need to be tough, and sometimes just overridden by someone who has made a rash promise to someone higher up the food chain.
Most teams are going through 4 stages in new application development scenarios:
- What are we building?
- How does it work?
- What will it look like?
- Development
Statistics show that uncertainty is up to 8x in the start of the process and we are usually asked to provide effort estimations at the moment of our utmost ignorance.
How can we make it work? Create detailed clickable prototypes of the app you are planning to develop and get it signed off by your business stakeholders before you write a single line of code.
Then you start from stage 4 and no effort is spent on things that hold no value. If a picture is worth a thousand words - a clickable prototype is worth a thousand meetings.
When designing apps - do clickable prototypes first - everything else second, since it brings value immediately in the design process to everybody involved.