Justin Mito

EFfort Estimation

14 May 2025
  1. My estimations were made by thinking about how I would solve an issue. One I have a general idea of what I needed to do, I could come up with a time estimate. In M3, these estimates were based on how long it took me to solve “similar” issues in M1 and M2. In the earlier segments, they were just guesses based on how long I thought they would take. These guesses were not based on evidence.
  2. The act of creating estimates encouraged me to think about how the issue would be resolved, which helped me get a clearer picture of how I would actually go about solving an issue. Once I understood how to solve an issue, I also had an idea of which issues would have to have been solved before I begun working on mine, so I knew when my issues needed to be resolved in each Milestone cycle.
  3. The only benefit I noticed in effort tracking was that I had a better idea of how long it actually took to complete a task. I found that I tended to underestimate how long it takes to complete a task, so tracking effort made it easier for me to predict/estimate effort that issues required.
  4. My effort was tracked by comparing the start to end time of each of my working sessions. When I completed a session or took a break, I noted down the effort I took until then. When I begun another work session, I added this session’s effort to the previous session’s, which I repeated to get the total effort. During collaborative efforts, I did not remember to track the time I took working, so the effort recorded is likely lower than the actual effort I put into my work. This approach was flawed in the way that, while the effort taken is (mostly) known, the exact distribution of effort between coding effort and non-coding effort was not. The coding effort and non-coding effort are effectively estimations, and therefore might not be very accurate.
  5. It was annoying to note down the effort each session took, as I tend to work in many short sessions. While the overhead is not very impactful, tracking the time did not come naturally to me, and felt like a chore.