I also would recommend this book to all programmers. It's a very understandable blend of guidelines plus the math and research that led to the formulation of those guidelines. It has greatly helped me in my current project, which was one of the biggest projects I've ever undertaken.

I often get asked for quick estimates of projects. My self-taught estimation technique had evolved like this over the years:
1. give a quick guess (usually turned out 3x too short)
2. make a quick guess, then triple that (usually closer, but still too short)
3. give a wildly pessimistic guess (never short, but not what my boss wants to hear)
Since reading the book, I feel my boss & I are both happier with the estimates/schedule that we figure out together.

In addition to presenting an easy-to-grasp summary of research into various individual factors that influence an estimate/schedule (like tilly's examples), the book leaves gives a lot of practical ideas for making better estimates.

Joe

In reply to Re: Interesting insights from Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by blahblahblah
in thread Interesting insights from Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by tilly

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.