I would prefer not to estimate at all because estimates are, in the Lean sense, waste: i.e., something that your customers don’t value.
Unfortunately, that argument never worked with my managers at project budgeting time.
As a result, because I was really bad at estimating, I spent a day teaching myself function point (FP) estimation. I also found a chart detailing how many hours of effort an “average” organization required to build projects of varying FP sizes. This meant that it was easy to make a simple spreadsheet using the chart data and Excel’s FORECAST function to generate estimates.
With that approach, my subsequent projects were always within 10% of the estimate, which is much better than my pre-function-point estimates. Combining that approach with the Agile idea of working on the most important features first meant that my projects were largely free of drama come deadline time.
Unfortunately, that argument never worked with my managers at project budgeting time.
As a result, because I was really bad at estimating, I spent a day teaching myself function point (FP) estimation. I also found a chart detailing how many hours of effort an “average” organization required to build projects of varying FP sizes. This meant that it was easy to make a simple spreadsheet using the chart data and Excel’s FORECAST function to generate estimates.
With that approach, my subsequent projects were always within 10% of the estimate, which is much better than my pre-function-point estimates. Combining that approach with the Agile idea of working on the most important features first meant that my projects were largely free of drama come deadline time.