Re: PM Confessional

[dHarry]

Ah confession time...

I once had to port an environment from Unix AIX to a VAX OpenVMS machine. Belief it or not, it was about 15 years ago:) Creating databases, dumping and loading data, modifying scripts and compiling tons of SW. At the end of a long day it all worked. "Let's just clean up this temporary directory and go home, I told my mate." Oops! I know the feeling, "hmm this takes longer than it should..." Next day it took about two hours to do everything again... I did learn from it, as it never happened again (so far).

Later a senior engineer explained me about the 4-factor. When you do overtime and get tired, everything takes 2 times as long and you make 2 times more mistakes. 2*2=4. It sounds silly but the 4-factor is a useful concept to know. Especially if you're managing a project and ask the SW engineers to do overtime to meet some deadline.

Cheers

Harry

[Albannach]

That reminds me of something a senior engineer told me about 20 years ago on the topic of estimating effort: double your first number and go the the next larger unit. So if your first reaction is 30 seconds, better say 60 minutes. Four hours is more likely to be 8 days, and so on. I'm still crap at estimating individual task effort, but I'm much better at total project cost at least.

[fullermd]

These sort of rules of thumb sound half-funny half-useful, until the day comes that you apply them and still wind up behind an 8-ball...

Er, not that that's ever happened to me, three times in a row, or anything. No siree...

[MidLifeXis]

Ours was multiply by two and add 40.