Estimates is the Holy Grail upon which projects thrive or perish. It is also high-risk, low-reward work that doesn’t get us any closer to DONE, can (and often does) gets us into trouble with the business, causes a big rush that leads to overtime, cutting corners and even team death marsh. So we all want to know: can we estimate better?
In this talk I want to consider what causes our estimates go terribly wrong. We will talk about what we can improve, what we may just have to accept, and discuss ideas from other industries regarding working with estimates.

This presentation references Standish Group CHAOS report, “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering” by F.P. Brooks, and behavioral science research.