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Ideal Days Aren't...

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Mitch has an interesting post (https://blogs.msdn.com/mitchl/default.aspx) that talks about ideal developer days, and he hits the nail on the head... There are no ideal developer days.... Ever.  Planning and estimating using them is kidding yourself, since there is always something that keeps folks from being 100% focused on their project.  It could be that you stayed up too late getting caught up on episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" from your DVR, or you had too much Halloween candy with your kids, and don't feel well.  You might even be just a little under the weather.  Or you could be fighting with your source control system and losing (like me today).  Whatever causes less than ideal days is not important.  The important thing is to not use ideal days for estimating schedules, or you will regret it later.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 03, 2006
    Wow, four days in a row, gol darn, I might just be getting predictable and dependable with these posts-).

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2006
    Don't forget "reading blogs." Anyway, it doesn't matter that ideal days != realistic days as long as you only use these numbers as a way to compare the relative magnitude of effort of one task/iteration/sprint to another. An organization can only correlate them to actual days after they have enough statistics from earlier iterations to derive a ratio of how many actual days it takes you to do the work of an ideal day. To fail to apply that multiplier (and just use ideal days as actual days for your plan) is foolishness. Equally as foolish is expecting an engineer to be able to give you realistic days to begin with. He's always going to hive you ideal days, so it's up to you as a project manager to do the conversion. Ideal days is the best we got.

  • Anonymous
    December 29, 2006
    Can read my blog http://codeinspections.blogspot.com for more info on Whitebox testing.

  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2007
    Wow, four days in a row, gol darn, I might just be getting predictable and dependable with these posts

  • Anonymous
    December 03, 2008
    Wow, four days in a row, gol darn, I might just be getting predictable and dependable with these posts-). Agile/Extreme Programming The Halloween/Nov Carnival of Agilis ts is up! There is a great section called "What Makes a method Agile" and