[Frost1x]

>If we don’t estimate then we are saying that software engineering is not an engineering discipline.

Not a mature engineering discipline.

If you can budget a planning phase in development that allows you to quickly explore the unknown unknowns and known unknowns to investigate critical bottlenecks and uncertainty before estimating and you're able to lock that down with a set of features, then I think you can create decent estimates.

That's rarely how any development environment in current existence operates though, at least from my anecdata. Most are 'agile' that can drastically shift directions, feature/scope creep is a continuous problem, there's a constant time pressure exerted by managenent on developmeny teams in hope to optimize a bit more productivity out of their high price tags which gives no slack space for them to dig into these issues (except maybe some personal time).

The entire modern development culture in most business environments is designed in a way that makes any sort of good quality estimation nearly impossible. In the best of conditions it can be hard but manageable, most environments are the worst of conditions.

[wtetzner]

> Not a mature engineering discipline.

How many projects in mature engineering disciplines are accurately estimated? I get the sense that this is a general problem, even outside of software.

[akiselev]

> Not a mature engineering discipline.

The concept of standardized parts and assembly lines is less than a century old. How accurate do you think their estimates were before they figured out the basic principles of repeatability?

The "mature" engineering disciplines literally just punted on the problem for several centuries, only giving birth to systems engineering [1] in the mid 20th century because they were so bad at it and everyone's back was against the wall in WWII. Before it became its own recognized field, project management in engineering was worse than it is in software now.

Not coincidentally Bell Labs - the company that basically kick started the computing industry - was also the biggest player in the formalization of systems engineering. Since then its been adapted as the methodology for managing engineering projects by everyone from civil engineers to NASA [2]. Any estimate you see for a nontrivial project from the past half century isn't the result of mechanical, civil, or electrical engineers but the product of systems engineers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering...