[MUD-Dev] Crunch time

[John Buehler]

katie at stickydata.com writes:

> Genius and the end result of genius are not one and the same.  In
> my experience, any industry that relies at all upon creativity has
> a risk factor that is represented by the creative people.  I have
> learned to take my programmers' time estimates and - literally -
> quadruple those estimates, which usually gives me, if I'm careful,
> about half as much as the initial estimate in extra time.

The next time an engineer is going to schedule something for you,
ask them for a breakdown of the entire development plan to tasks
that take no longer than 3 days to complete.  If they're an engineer
worth their salt, they'll give you a viable task list.  You'll learn
about their ability to predict all their tasks, and you'll also
learn a ton about how they're going to build the software and when
you'll actually have various pieces of functionality.  If you
understand software development, you can sanity check the duration
of various tasks.  When a half day is allocated for developing the
document data structures that the project is going to be relying on,
you may not be talking about the same data structures that your
engineer is.

JB
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