Time taken to quote for development work

BrokenArrows

Up until now projects have always had development time allotted to them before they reach me.
Development Management have recently decided that they should start getting the project developer to quote for the time instead.

That's fine with me and I can pretty accurately quote for the time its going to take me to perform a task.

I'm just curious what people would consider a reasonable amount of time to come up with a time quote?

As an example my last project I quoted 20 days development. It took me about 1 day to research all the aspects and come up with a quote.
So I spent 5% of the development time coming up with the quote. Is this reasonable?

SalteeDog

Ah the bane of every developers life.

Make sure you are aware of the 'cone of uncertainty' and what it means. If at all possible always give an estimate in terms of a range.

In general the more time you are given to do the estimate the better - assuming you use that time to systematically construct a better estimation and you are properly using all the relevant information at your disposal. How much time is reasonable or not is a function of what stage the project is at and how complex the work appears to be. In general though spending a day to estimate a 20 man day piece of work does not seem unreasonable.

Be aware management will probably correlate the accuracy of your estimation with the time taken to do it. They may think that by giving you a full day to work it will mean you will deliver an estimate to +-10% even if the 'spec' is two lines on an email. You should always try to counter that up front - "e.g this will take me a day to estimate to +- X% accuracy give the information presented".

BTW I've never successfully managed to sell a .25x to 4x estimate to anyone. That level of uncertainty in totally indigestible by management...easier to sell a high-ball estimate with a lower margin of error.

ChRoMe

BrokenArrows wrote: »

That's fine with me and I can pretty accurately quote for the time its going to take me to perform a task.

Really? because the on the whole the industry is horrifically bad at that, unless the complexity of the work is trivial.

BrokenArrows

ChRoMe wrote: »

Really? because the on the whole the industry is horrifically bad at that, unless the complexity of the work is trivial.

Maybe im just that good! lol.

amen

That's fine with me and I can pretty accurately quote for the time its going to take me to perform a task

me too and for a teams of developers!

ChRoMe

BrokenArrows wrote: »

Maybe im just that good! lol.

How do you measure the accuracy of your estimations?

BrokenArrows

ChRoMe wrote: »

How do you measure the accuracy of your estimations?

The development takes the time I quoted!

Tar.Aldarion

Like so:

ChRoMe

BrokenArrows wrote: »

The development takes the time I quoted!

Sorry I meant the actual process, do you have people record the time against a JIRA ticket or similar.

SalteeDog

Well fair plays to you for always meeting commitments but if you are achieving that by putting in extra hours (or indeed without having the time to slack off) then your estimation is not entirely accurate.

It's a moot point though as far as your boss is concerned as you are delivering the goods on time.

How did you fare when others were estimating your work?

Also - to get back to the original point of your question - if you need to take 5% of the development time to produce an estimate that is (say for sake of argument) >85% accurate then that is money/time well spent.

BrokenArrows

ChRoMe wrote: »

Sorry I meant the actual process, do you have people record the time against a JIRA ticket or similar.

Yes we enter our time worked on each project in a tool. Its got a name but I cant for the life of me remeber what it is. We are replacing it with JIRA soon.

BrokenArrows

SalteeDog wrote: »

Well fair plays to you for always meeting commitments but if you are achieving that by putting in extra hours (or indeed without having the time to slack off) then your estimation is not entirely accurate.

It's a moot point though as far as your boss is concerned as you are delivering the goods on time.

How did you fare when others were estimating your work?

Also - to get back to the original point of your question - if you need to take 5% of the development time to produce an estimate that is (say for sake of argument) >85% accurate then that is money/time well spent.

I dont put in extra hours. I dont get paid enough!

How can you justify including slacking off time. Lol.

Management were always realistic when it came to quoting, if anything they over quoted.