Re: Estimate of hours to be spent on a project

From: Phlip (phlip_cpp_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/11/04 

Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 15:18:56 GMT

Nick Malik wrote:

> However, the business users don't care.
>
> Think about it. If you ask an architect "how much will it cost to build
my
> house," and he gives an answer, he will be CLOSE. He or she will set
> expectations that there are unknown things that occur, and changes can be
> made at many points. However, an architect building a house, or an
engineer
> designing a supporting structure, is still required to give an accurate
> estimate. This is not a "direction". This is a very specific
destination,
> with specific features, specific resources, a specific timeline, and a
> reasonable estimate of how far off the estimate is likely to be.
>
> These questions can be answered by science. The techniques can be learned
> by engineering. Unfortunately, in Computer Science, we largely ignore the
> Science. We, as an industry, do a lousy job of creating a hypothesis and
> actually TESTING it to see if it works. That's why Waterfall models are
so
> prevalent. They make sense... who care if they are wrong!

Building a house depends on millenia of experience. Building the house is
the construction phase - the equivalent of one source rebuild.

Software Engineers use a 50-year old discipline to _design_ things.
Designing is really really hard.

Imagine if you get your architect's degree, and then get transported to a
moon at the Lagrange point between a gas giant and its giant moon. Your new
alien customers request a domicile made of gelatine, located on a plot of
land that experiences daily and seasonal tides up to 0.25 g.

You must begin all of your experiments over from scratch. Also, maybe the
aliens _want_ a house whose back walls stretch up every evening, and whose
front walls stretch up every morning. Or maybe not. You have no idea how to
predict anything in this process. The best alternative is to let the aliens
participate in scheduling the experiments and analyzing their results.

> (It makes sense that a cannon ball should fall faster than a wooden ball,
> but they don't. Everyone assumed that they did... until a simple
scientific
> experiment proved them wrong. To thank the scientist, the Catholic church
> convicted Galileo of heresy and convicted him to life under house arrest).

It would have helped if Galileo had not written a deliberately inflamatory
book putting all the Pope's words in the mouth of a character named
"Simplicitous". 

-- 
  Phlip
  http://industrialxp.org/community/bin/view/Main/TestFirstUserInterfaces

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