Why Does it Always Take Longer Than I Thought

How much work can we fit into an iteration. Well that's an easy question to answer. You know how many people you have, can size the work, a bit of math and you have your answer... simple!

Well unfortunately its not anywhere near that easy and if you think it is, probably explains why you have to rush, get surprised why things are taking so long and if a manager, wondering if you have the right team for the job.

The truth is that everything takes longer than it should. Well actually it takes as long as its supposed to.

I remember a top manager saying "Our quality is good but the work ALWAYS takes twice as long compared to the estimate and that is not good enough". Well I'm sorry to say that if it ALWAYS takes twice as long its the estimation that is the problem as it should be twice as big (to half the time taken you need to improve processes not use un-realistic time scales).

NO ONE ever works on a task all the time:

• There will always be problems that no one thought of
• If you are a team you will be helping each other
• People will interrupt you for information or you may need to go see them
• We all need to get away from the computer from time to time

An approach that can be used to estimates which are a bit more like reality is Velocity Estimation.