How much of planning is a 'science' that is calculable, and how much is 'gut instinct' - and how do you work out the reliability/accuracy of a dev-estimate for implementing a feature?asked by Logical Chimp

I'll answer the last part of the question first. Every developer super different. As a producer, it is difficult to get accurate estimates out of people until you know them so the more time you spend with them and the more you can go like - ok, so 4 hours for him really means 2 or 4 hours for him really means 8. It's not like one is slower or faster, it's literally just the way they think about how long it'll take.

Yeah, we talked about this I think on jmack's question, the better you understand your team the easier it becomes. These teams that have worked together for years and years and years you know exactly what they mean or you don't even have to do it, a lot of times I would get to a sense after working with a certain team for a certain amount of time I could pre-fill their bids. Obviously, you would talk to them afterward to make sure they're accurate but you know: I know it usually takes Jennifer three weeks for that, you know it takes... there is a science to it and that science is understanding your team and then also understanding the project you're working on.

Yeah and knowing what the technical details of what they are doing. We got to a point, during the 1.0 crunch for example, 90% of the tasks that came through I could assign what I thought was a pretty good value and then look at it with the guys and they'd be - yup, yup, yup, cool. Another fun game to play for any aspiring producers out there, is play the, "What if?" game with anyone who's giving you an estimate, especially the longer the task, if it's a 2-3 week kind of a thing - yeah, we could probably do it in 3 or 4 weeks and it's like oh, you feel like taking a day off? What if you get sick? What if your dog gets sick? You know, it's kinda evil, all these bad things that can happen in your life that could derail you but there's a lot of things that people don't account for, it's totally natural. They've actually done studies on it and I've read them in books which - books like Drive by Daniel Pink - which are great.

That's a great one, yeah.

Anyways, you as a human being have a natural predilection to underestimate a large task and overestimate a small task and so you can apply some baseline modifiers mathematically so back to your, is it calculable? Average good one is everybody works about 70% of an 8 hour day between going to the bathroom, eating lunch and blah, blah, blah so that's another one you can look at. If I have 40 hours of tasks that's going to be about a week and a half worth of work so there's little things like that you can do mathematically and the rest is there is gut, especially when you're looking at the finaling of a project you can see, oh okay what's our burn down saying - how many bugs entered versus how many resolved. You go, okay what's our rate of increase and change in that and you can start to do your own little math that says - ok, we'll probably be around this date - I remember for Arena Commander 0.8, I knew in order ship we needed to get all critical and majors done and so I just applied that math and I think the date was May 30th and we ended up going on June 4th.

Not bad.

That was back in like March.

That's not bad.

I was actually quite proud of that one. [laughs]

Well done.

So it's both - it's math and gut.

You know to that point - I think experience, the reason they say the more time you're in something, this goes with any kinda job, the more time you're in something the more comfortable you get with that information so the more experience you have whether it's with a team or just working in an industry or working with a certain type of product, maybe you just always make FPSs, the better it is for your bidding and your gut then reacts to that experience but the one thing I challenge people on with that experience is to always still start with experience, start with that knowledge but then add to it, break it, don't just... a lot of producer's get stuck in that.

You sit in your zone.

Yeah, it's like the technology is constantly changing, new fantastic talent is coming out of college, right. There's new things that people are out there doing with a smaller team than you've ever done 20-30 years ago...

Entirely new ways to manage your time.

You got it, so be agile enough to move with that stuff but you know, a good foundation of experience is good. Great question.