Sworn enemies?

Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings.

Terry Prattchet

The last couple of weeks have seen me drawn into another skirmish in the defining contest of the information-age workplace: schedule and cost estimation for development projects.

Managers of course need to know what things will cost and when they will be done. Developers know from hard won experience that it is not possible to know either of those things before you start the work. The closest things to reliable soluions that have been developed seem to fall into two rough categories:

• Process-heavy mechanisms where you front-load the detailed design and get a moderately reliable estimate of the total cost and time when you're 15-20% into the effort, but entailing some risk of a complete failure
• Agile methods which get to something early and evolve ever closer to the desired product over time and might be alleged to generate a reasonable approximation to the spec given the schedule and budget allow

Now, our client has allowed us to pursure the latter strategy while my project was an exploration of possibiliies (and just as well, it's what I know how to do), but now that it is a product in actual use, they are asking for or even insisting on firm commitments on both time and money. Sigh. Best guess and a generous pad it is.