Software Estimation Without Guessing

Optimization

People often talk about optimizing a work process. But optimizing for what dimension?

optimize (verb)

1844, “to act as an optimist,” back-formation from optimist. Meaning “to make the most of” is first recorded 1857.

Often, people try to go as fast and/or cheaply as possible. So they ask for optimistic estimates, build a plan based on them, and then try to stick to that plan. In the process, they forget about determining how things are progressing by other measures. We’ve just looked at some of the many ways that optimizing for speed is suboptimal for some other measures you might care about.

There’s more to speed than trying to do things faster, though. There are other ways of approaching the issue.

Managing Work to Capacity

Achieving ...