Articles on Software Estimation

How to Avoid One of the Costliest Mistakes in Software Engineering

A few weeks ago, a young startup engineer reached out to me for advice. Her CEO had given her team 4 weeks to rewrite the web product from scratch. That was over 3 months ago. The project was now 2 months behind, the team was working overtime at 80+ hours per week, and a laundry list of bugs remained. Stress levels were high, and each passing day of not shipping... (more)

How Do I Tell My Team to Work More Hours to Hit a Launch Date?

This blog post is based on an answer I wrote on Quora. Before telling your team to work more hours, make sure that you have a realistic plan for actually hitting the launch date. Otherwise, your best strategy in the long run is probably either to redefine the launch to what your team can deliver by that date based on the current pace or to reset the deadline to something... (more)

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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