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Jules Roadknight
Jules Roadknight

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Estimating, Part 1

INT. 8TH LIGHT - DAY 2 END

"Optimistic .5, realistic .75...pessimistic 1.25."
"Okay, thats .67."
I'm sitting with my mentor and support mentor, and their faces give nothing away. I've been estimating features with a new system, where 1 point is half a day, or 4 hours. Simple enough project; A 'Tic-Tac-Toe' game in Ruby, fully tested, pulling down features from a Kanban board.

"Next, allow the user to choose a human-human or human-computer game. Questions?"
He keeps adding features until I've estimated about a week's work, normally 8 points.
"I'll see you in a week then!"

I am glad to be getting stuck in with a project so soon. The work itself is not new, but I've never worked with estimates this way, and never done the estimating solo, so I'm curious to see how it'll turn out. My mentor said nothing about my estimates, other than this first task would gauge my estimating.

DAY 3 END

At the end of day 3 I've completed a few features with a tiny amount of time to spare, so far so good! Hopefully it's a good sign, but I'm feeling the pressure that comes with estimating already and that's not a bad thing.

INT. JULES

Time pressure has so far kept me focused as I track every minute, and pushed me to ask colleagues for help sooner. I'm sticking strictly to the idea that it's not done until it's done done, so no compromising or pushing problems back.

Will Jules complete the mission in time? Join us next week for part 2!

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