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.
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