December 2006
Intermediate to advanced
610 pages
22h 58m
English
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Chapter 21. HOW LONG IS A PIECE OF STRING?
The Black Art of Software Timescale Estimation
I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.
—Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
How long is a piece of string? Or for our purposes, how long does a piece of string take? It’s as simple a question to answer, and it makes about as much sense.
This chapter is about software timescale estimation, an important skill of the professional programmer. It’s one of the mystical black arts of development, based more on hunches than science, with frequently inaccurate results. It’s complicated, but an essential part of the software development process, and is something that every programmer must learn to do.
The rules of the software factory ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.