Estimating Effort
08 May 2025
How did you make your effort estimates?
My final project team chose one person to create our tracking spreadsheet, and we had one person assigning our issues to whoever was best suited to solve them. Generally, we each estimated the time we thought it would take for us to do our own tasks. My effort estimations were based on how long I know it has taken me to complete similar tasks in the past, however over time I was able to see how my estimations were innacurate and create more accurate estimations in the future. Interestingly, I noticed that my coding tasks often took less time than I expected - if there were no unexpected errors - and that my noncoding tasks often took me much longer than I had thought they did.
Even though your estimates were always off, sometimes way off, was there any benefit from making effort estimates for the issues in advance? If so, what benefits? If not, why not?
My estimates were always under or over the actual recorded time it took. However, there was benefit to making effort estimates. It forced us to consider what would really be going into completing the tasks, and mentally plan each ones steps, and the time and mental effort it might take. However, I personally usually plan my approach to a task before tackling it anyway, so the estimating was not neccessary for that purpose. What it did help with was my understanding of how much time in minutes or hours I thought it could take, which helped me plan when to do which thing, by order and in my schedule. It also helped me to see the balance of the workload across my teammates.
Was there any benefit for tracking the actual effort expended on the issues? If so, what benefits? If not, why not? Was there any downside to estimating and tracking your effort? If so what?
The benefits of tracking the actual effort that it took to deal with each issue included an increased awareness of how much effort, time-wise, was actually being put into the project. It helped to see how long different kinds of tasks took, and if different people took more or less time than others on various things, to see who was doing what within our project. I was able to reference it for each milestone’s google form, reporting on the percentage of the work each team member did for that milestone. It was also motivating to see that some of the tasks took a lot less time than we had thought, and on the flip side, if something took us longer than expected it was able to signal to us to pay more attention and effort to that issue.
How did you track your actual effort? How accurate do you believe your tracking was?
My teammates may have used different methods than I did, but my tracking method was usually simply looking at the time before I started on an issue, and then checking it again once I was done and doing the math. I found this to be the best for myself, because when I actually tracked my time with a timer for WODs in the past, it made me more aware of the time I was taking and sometimes disrupted my focus by making me self concious, or made me attempt to work faster but not better. Because I didn’t use an actual timer, my tracking may not have been entirely accurate to the minute. However, I do believe that it was accurate enough to the amount of time and energy I put into each task, especially as I was consistently using the same method across all of my issues.
How much overhead was there in tracking your effort? Did it take up a noticable amount of time or inhibit you working on the project?
To track my effort, it was a quick glance at the clock on my laptop or phone both before and after my work time, and then updating the spreadsheet for a minute or two. This made it so that the overhead was very low for my tracking, and it did not take up a noticable amount of time. It could have been worse had I been more strict about timing myself with a timer, or been overly aware of my working pace. Tracking my progress did not inhibit my work on the progress at all, and if anything it made me feel more organized and grounded to have another tool to track the completion of each milestone.