Every developer, technical lead, project manager, and salesperson at least once faced a task to prepare an estimate for a project or request from the client. In many agencies fixed scope projects are common. But why? Because it is the nature of humanity, we want to know how much it would cost and, if possible, find where we can get the same quality but cheaper.

As a result, developers and those who participate in the estimation process struggle with guessing how much time developers would spend doing the task. In some cases, we know exactly what we need, in some not. And depending on that information, estimates vary. We definitely can say that features are cheap and details are expensive. But how to make estimates accurate when you do not know all the details, how to make them low and still profitable for the agency to win the bid? How should the estimation process look like to avoid over budget on the project and to avoid the team’s stress from thinking they estimated incorrectly, and because of that, the company loses money?

If you ask these questions to many agencies, no one will give you a “golden pill” on how to estimate the project when the client wants an accurate estimate and does not want to work on the T & M approach.

In Five Jars, during the last five years, we try to learn from our projects to answer ourselves
- How to estimate a project so you don’t go over budget
- How to improve processes to speed up the estimation process
- How to reuse estimates we did for a new client
- How to deal with change requests
- What tools can help us
- And many other questions…

So, you got the idea, we are going to talk about the estimation process and things that you can implement in your team or agency to make your team's life better. (Familiarity with Drupal is not required to follow the session).