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Estimation: Historical evidence of the teams performance

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So what if the individual doing the estimate is a star and thinks everyone else is as well – they estimate based on what they (think they) would be capable of (sometimes with a great deal of personal sacrifice added in).

This is not a good situation for a team of developers – they will quickly work out the timeline is unattainable and morale issues will start to flare up.

So the solution is (in a perfect world) to base the estimate on the historical performance of the team. I’m going to dedicate a separate post to this aspect but suffice to say there are several approaches to this:

  1. Comparisons based against projects with a similar level functionality
  2. Comparisons based on an understanding of the current teams capability

I’ll give you a hint – you need to use a mixture of the above an estimate based exclusively on either one will always be flawed.

I’ll detail this in the next two posts….