Need someone to lead product management at your software company? I create software for people that create software and I'm looking for my next opportunity. Check out my resume and get in touch.

Estimating ship dates

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 16 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

27 Oct 2007

Joel Spolsky describes a new feature in the FogBugz bug tracking application. Evidence Based Scheduling is an automated way of comparing developer estimates to their past work.

What you get is not just one ship date: you get a confidence distribution curve, showing the probability that you will ship on any given date.

In a nutshell, you figure out how much a developer generally misses their estimates by and then FogBugz uses a random distribution of those numbers to give you a series of possible ship dates along with the probability that the code will ship on those dates.

This is similar to how many software shops already do their estimating, but FogBugz has created a great way of automating it and making it a tool.

Joel includes the detailed mechanics of how FogBugz calculates this, and I’d expect to see other project management tools replicating this in the near future.

Recently Written

Too Big To Fail (Apr 9): When a company piles resources on a new product idea, it doesn't have room to fail. That keeps it from succeeding.
Go small (Apr 4): The strengths of a large organization are the opposite of what makes innovation work. Starting something new requires that you start with a small team.
Start with a Belief (Apr 1): You can't use data to build products unless you start with a hypothesis.
Mastery doesn’t come from perfect planning (Dec 21): In a ceramics class, one group focused on a single perfect dish, while another made many with no quality focus. The result? A lesson in the value of practice over perfection.
The Dark Side of Input Metrics (Nov 27): Using input metrics in the wrong way can cause unexpected behaviors, stifled creativity, and micromanagement.
Reframe How You Think About Users of your Internal Platform (Nov 13): Changing from "Customers" to "Partners" will give you a better perspective on internal product development.
Measuring Feature success (Oct 17): You're building features to solve problems. If you don't know what success looks like, how did you decide on that feature at all?
How I use OKRs (Oct 13): A description of how I use OKRs to guide a team, written so I can send to future teams.