How do you make task duration estimates when situations like 'technical blockers' pop up?asked by Steve Hunter
TL;DRThe producers estimate task durations by asking developers and scaling for project needs, add a roughly five to ten percent buffer, and admit schedules quickly become obsolete when blockers appear, so it involves a lot of guesstimating.
I don't think one is necessarily contingent upon the other one thing we do is talk developers and ask them how long they think it will take and this is predacted on their knowledge if it's something they've already done we as producers will have a good idea to taken them in the past. We look at the scale of what their doing and we upscale it or downscale it based on the project needs.If situations like technical blockers pop up something we've mentioned in previous Ten for The Producers videos is every time we put together a schedule and publish it for the team it soon becomes obsolete because dates and how long someone takes on a take can change from day to day we may need a programmer on a task pulled off because we've got another blocker that needs a fix and that may even become related to what he's working on. Because we are a I wouldn't say a small office but we have a limited number of resources that makes each time how a developer spends on a particular project that much more valuable. So being able to plot out that time is a very tricky thing to do.
It is and how do you plan for that? It always comes down we've never done it before the teams never done it before we've talked about this before at the end of it just add five ten percent buffer they will take 2 weeks so we give them a little bit over two and a half weeks and say that's our coverage. So you'll tend to see production bloat things a little bit more but that's usually to protect the team. You want to over deliver as opposed to the other way around where people over promise. Anything that's part of our job as production is to go we're going to add a little bit extra time because even if comes down we deliver faster and then we'll know for the next time as well.
On top of that let's say that I ask Mark Abent to do a programming task and he gives me an estimate that it takes fives days. Is that five days from now or five days worth of work? That's something we have to be concerned with as well what resources does he have at his disposal as well?
And being a live plus development pre-production plus production and you also have to add in a certain amount of bugs. It's a good question and it does come down to we're doing a lot of guesstimating and you have to trust the team the team usually knows the best or if they've never done it before you just add a bonus and go.