[ryan-allen]

I find estimating dishonest too. I tell clients that a project becomes late 'one day at a time' and that the higher clarity there is in the objective, the more creative we can be about trying to solve the problem. so there is less work to undertake to reach it.

I don't think a developer's salary is high enough to justify taking on any moral risk on the basis of estimation of any project.

In Australia, even the highest budget software projects have major cost and time blow-outs, often in years and often in 100s of millions of dollars. If this were a solved problem then this would not be the case.

I think the best thing you can do is retrospective analysis of work completed for a given individual and a team, and use that to project, but I am yet to find a client who is vaguely interested in such a thing, e.g. Joel on Software's Monte Carlo estimation solution [0].

I'm cynical because it's early!

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...