Planning Accuracy: How to Know If Your Team Overestimates or Underestimates Tasks
· 9 min read
"This should take two days." Three weeks later, the feature is still in progress.
Steve McConnell, in Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art, found that software projects typically overrun initial estimates by 28-85%. Brooks's Law from The Mythical Man-Month explains part of the reason: complexity grows non-linearly with scope, and adding people to a late project makes it later. The PM is frustrated. The developer feels guilty. The roadmap is fiction. And the entire organization has quietly accepted that engineering estimates are unreliable.
This isn't a people problem. It's a measurement problem. And it's fixable.