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Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, 2nd Edition
book

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, 2nd Edition

by Robert C. Martin
October 2025
Intermediate to advanced
673 pages
15h 55m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, 2nd Edition

35

Estimate Honestly and Fairly

8. I will produce estimates that are honest both in magnitude and precision. I will not make promises without reasonable certainty.

In this chapter, we’re going to talk about estimating projects and large tasks that take many days or weeks to accomplish. This is not the same as the Agile practice of estimating small tasks and stories, which I describe in the book Clean Agile.1

1. [Clean Agile].

Knowing how to estimate is an essential skill for every software developer; and one that most of us are very, very bad at.

The skill is essential because every business needs to know, roughly, how much something is going to cost before they commit resources to it.

Unfortunately, our failure to understand what estimates ...

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Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

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Robert C. Martin

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780135398586