Estimates are almost always wrong
If you’ve worked in software for any length of time, you know the pattern. Estimates come in, plans get made, and reality runs longer and costs more. Sometimes a little. Often a lot.
This isn’t because people are bad at estimating. It’s because software has properties that make estimating hard. Unknown unknowns. Hidden complexity. Coordination overhead. Edge cases that only appear once the work starts. These things eat into every estimate, no matter how careful.
You can’t make estimates accurate. You can make them more useful — by knowing what they’re for, what they aren’t, and how to plan around their predictable imperfections.
Why estimates are systematically optimistic
Software estimates aren’t just often wrong — they’re wrong in a particular direction....
