[yinzer-solomon]

I would prefer not to estimate at all because estimates are, in the Lean sense, waste: i.e., something that your customers don’t value.

Unfortunately, that argument never worked with my managers at project budgeting time.

As a result, because I was really bad at estimating, I spent a day teaching myself function point (FP) estimation. I also found a chart detailing how many hours of effort an “average” organization required to build projects of varying FP sizes. This meant that it was easy to make a simple spreadsheet using the chart data and Excel’s FORECAST function to generate estimates.

With that approach, my subsequent projects were always within 10% of the estimate, which is much better than my pre-function-point estimates. Combining that approach with the Agile idea of working on the most important features first meant that my projects were largely free of drama come deadline time.