[rpwilcox]

Did it help? How often did you end up repeating the same task?

(Personally, I have this feeling that my tasks tend to be varied enough that 'number of times done' would almost always == 1, however, I don't have any actual data to back that assertion up. (And maybe you used this to hone in on the "true hour cost of a 2 story point task"???)

[elevensies]

I am probably thinking here at a different level of granularity than you are, I would be talking about days to weeks here. I can't recall ever repeating the same task. It helped by letting me notice systematic errors and by helping me calibrate optimism / pessimism.

In my estimates I was focused too much on development time and not providing adequately for testing and deployment. On an existing project with the procedures already well in place it was fine, but for new or new-ish projects I was always under-estimating.

The other thing was calibrating my margin of safety. I now typically estimate at 2x the time that I think it will take to allow for unexpected issues and unrelated tasks that always pop up. That also works for me with the expectations of the people that I work with -- the estimates are used for planning and coordination and aren't effectively deadlines, but if I underestimate too often is causes coordination problems with the business people.

[AlexC04]

Surely you're getting the sense of the patterns of things you're doing.

Maybe something like "that's probably 3 loops and an email"

That's a couple hours for the loops... A couple more for the email, assuming HTML has to be dynamic based on a model with 5 values... Etc...

Sure it's not identical every time, but the patterns are the same.

[rpwilcox]

Sure, sometimes. Between that, the story point ideal of "... relative to other tasks completed in the project", and a long enough term project, things may start to look the same _in that project_.

It also depends on how much leeway your estimates can have: if it turns out to be waaaay more than two loops and an email, what happens? Does management just nod, or do they start "negotiations" about not paying for the work it took you over the "estimate"?