[justinpombrio]

It just sounded like teasing because it's a famously hard problem.

But having read your proposal, I actually totally believe that that could result in accurate time estimates. To summarize, remove the unknowns by planning things out beforehand, then count how many hundreds of small pieces you'll need! That sounds plausible as long as what you're doing is straightforward. (E.g., no crazy database optimizations needed to make things fast enough, no crazy ML techniques needed to make things accurate enough, no crazy algorithms needed to solve NP-hard problems, etc.)

[java-man]

You are right: non-trivial things are hard to estimate - as tasks may not even have an upper time limit.

But in the majority of software development projects the tasks are trivial, and it is possible to enumerate all the little details and their dependencies.

I was thinking of writing a tool to support the process instead of using excel, but unfortunately the dev has stalled due to lack of time on my part.

https://github.com/andy-goryachev/ReqTraq