Psychological Issues Related To Effort Estimation
There are many psychological factors potentially explaining the strong tendency towards over-optimistic effort estimates that need to be dealt with to increase accuracy of effort estimates. These factors are essential even when using formal estimation models, because much of the input to these models is judgment-based. Factors that have been demonstrated to be important are: Wishful thinking, anchoring, planning fallacy and cognitive dissonance. A discussion on these and other factors can be found in work by Jørgensen and Grimstad.
- It's easy to estimate what you know.
- It's hard to estimate what you know you don't know.
- It's very hard to estimate things that you don't know you don't know.
Read more about this topic: Software Development Effort Estimation
Famous quotes containing the words issues, related, effort and/or estimation:
“The “universal moments” of child rearing are in fact nothing less than a confrontation with the most basic problems of living in society: a facing through one’s children of all the conflicts inherent in human relationships, a clarification of issues that were unresolved in one’s own growing up. The experience of child rearing not only can strengthen one as an individual but also presents the opportunity to shape human relationships of the future.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“No being exists or can exist which is not related to space in some way. God is everywhere, created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space that it occupies; and whatever is neither everywhere nor anywhere does not exist. And hence it follows that space is an effect arising from the first existence of being, because when any being is postulated, space is postulated.”
—Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
“I am particularly interested in the indications that the people seem to understand and approve the necessity of pursuing the course that will prevent a further effort on the part of the German peoples to continue the struggle for world domination, even though they are thoroughly beaten in this war.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“A higher class, in the estimation and love of this city- building, market-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console them for the short-comings of the day, and the meanness of labor and traffic.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)