Thursday, November 16

Estimating Sandwiches: Why the Gut Doesn't Work, and How Small Is Better : Developer Tea


Estimating Sandwiches: Why the Gut Doesn't Work, and How Small Is Better

Scale might slow us down in our day to day operations.
I'm likely to take longer per sandwich to make 100 sandwiches than I would to make 1 sandwich.
However I'm much more likely to make each sandwich faster on an average, if I'm making only 5 sandwiches. Because the support I need to make 5 sandwiches is about the same as I need to make 1 sandwich.

The same principles are true when it comes to software.
When we are building at scale it is very easy to need a larger infrastructure. It becomes more of a management problem when we need a larger infrastructure to scale.
Now, ultimately, that scale is important in order to support the job that we have.
What you do with your code, what you do with your software, will change to support the new scale that you are working at.

You have similar overhead issues when you start scaling an application.

Remember that estimation is affected by all of these things.

How can we estimate better?

Estimate smaller things.
Don't try to estimate the big project or multiple things.
Only estimate things that you have a high amount of confidence that your estimation is relatively correct.
When you estimate smaller things, there is less room for error, there is less room for you to make a mistake. That is fundamentally the important part of estimation, is trying to limit the number of places where you might make mistakes in that estimation process.

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