Many, many moons ago I asked my mentor how to estimate. He told me that you should figure out what it feels like, then double it and then take it to the next higher time unit.
"hmm, adding that button probably takes about an hour"... 2 days is about right.
Almost 30 years later I still find this to be true. Truer than I like.
You don’t want them interacting with you too often for one hour tasks. You want to train them to lower resolutions slices. And you want to round up small ones to do refactoring as well.
Eventually they get a sense of just right. It’s never perfect but they are estimating before they even ask. Whic if we’re honest, they’ve done anyway and they’re hoping we will agree, absolving them of the responsibility.
Not that I've used this extensively, but months would likely increase to quarters.
And if you're estimating something to the lengths of months, you're already into project management territory size, rather than broken down to development/delivery sizes... The amount of unknown unknowns and other uncertainty certainly warrant happily estimating years length, surely.
"hmm, adding that button probably takes about an hour"... 2 days is about right.
Almost 30 years later I still find this to be true. Truer than I like.