[StackRanker3000]

It’s extremely useful for a business to have a rough idea of when they’ll be able to deliver something. Budgets, contracts, client relationships, marketing, etc are affected by it.

So should Engineering give a best effort to estimate that, or just throw up their hands and say “it’s done when it’s done”?

[n4r9]

Counterpoint: it's extremely useful for the Trisolarans to know when their next stable period will be, but that doesn't make it reasonable to demand an estimate and factor it into a contract unless you're really really clear about the uncertainty in the estimate.

[StackRanker3000]

Yes, we should all live in reality and use our best judgement. If estimating based on story point velocity is literally useless, then no one should be doing it. However if it does help make planning more accurate, even by a little, then it might be worth the cost of doing so. It’s a conversation to be had between different functions, hopefully based on empirical evidence.

I feel like a lot of engineers overlook that there’s more to a viable business than just producing high-quality software. People don’t ask for estimates just to annoy developers.

[n4r9]

> People don’t ask for estimates just to annoy developers.

No, I know, there's just a systemic difficulty with scheduling dev items that are difficult to estimate.

My team is currently working on performance improvements for a certain service in order to get it to a level that our biggest client is happy with. Based on some profiling and some intuition, I built some Jira cards with rough ideas of what changes might make some improvements and added some rough estimates of how long it would take to trial each idea. Of course, what's actually happening is that we try one idea, it counter-intuitively makes performance worse, we dig into why that's the case and refine the idea, then try a different version of it. It's fundamentally impossible to give an estimate for when we will have run through all the ideas (plus new ones we think up along the way) and how much of an improvement it will make.

I just came out of a slightly painful standup where the dev manager repeatedly asked "Is this doable by mid-August?", and I repeatedly answered that it's not possible to give such an accurate estimate, that we would do what we can in that time and hope to give a better idea of what's possible by the end of this month. Of course it's not great for the dev manager to hear, because they have a client who needs to know how quickly they can scale up their use of the service. There's a conflict between what we can possibly know and what the client "needs" to know. I wish that I knew how to resolve it. It feels wrong to agree to deliver something with such a level of uncertainty, since it just leads to a ridiculous amount of pressure like this.

[StackRanker3000]

That’s all fair. It’s an inherently difficult problem. In a healthy organization, leadership is aware of this, has reasonable expectations and factors in the risk. Unfortunately not all organizations are mature in this way.