Estimating for Software is Like Estimating for Skinning a Cat

As I’ve mentioned a few times, estimation is an imprecise art.    There are ways to increase accuracy of the estimation either through consensus based estimation or other methods.    This post explores why estimations are hard and why the software world struggles to find tools, techniques and methods that provide for consistent and accurate estimations.

I’ve recently been playing with Codewars (connect with me there) and have been intrigued by the variance of the solutions that are provided.  In particular, you have the “smart” developers who come up with one-liners that need a PhD to decode, tight code, maintainable code, and then clearly hacked till it works code.  This variance is likely the underlying reason for the difficulty in getting consistently accurate estimates.

Read on for more some of the examples that I have pulled from the Convert Hex String to RGB kata.  The variance is quite astonishing.  When you dig deeper into the differences, you can begin to see the vast differences in approaches.  I’m not going to dig deeper into my personal views of the pro’s and cons of each one, but it did provide me a lightbulb moment as to the how software in particular always going to be difficult to estimate accurately.

I came up with an interesting analogy when pushed by a colleague on systematic ways of estimating.  His assertion was that other industries (building in his example) have systematic ways of doing time and cost estimates for doing work.  While not diminishing the trades, there are considerably less degrees of freedom for, say, a framer putting up a house frame.  The fundamental degrees of freedom are

• experience – apprentice or master
• tools – Nails or nail gun
• quality of lumber – (not sure how to build this in)

For an master carpenter, framing will be very quick, for an apprentice, it will be slow.  The actual person doing the framing will likely be somewhere in between.   Likewise, using nail and hammer will be slow, and a nail gun will be fast.  The combination of those two factors will be the prime determinant of how long a piece of framing will take to complete.

I code however, we bring in other factors that need to be include in estimates, but are typically not considered until the code is being written.  Looking at the examples below, we see the tools that are available.

• Array utility operators (ie: slice)
• string operators (ie: substring)
• direct array index manipulation (array[index])
• regular expression (.match)
• lookup Tables (.indexOf)

Using each of these tools has an general impact on the speed that the code can be written, and the speed that it can be debugged and the general maintainability of the code.

With this simple example, I feel that the current practice of “order of” that is popular in agile is sufficient for the type of accuracy that we will get.  Fibonacci, t-shirt sizes, hours/days/weeks/months/quarters, are really the among the best classes of estimates that we can get.

function hexStringToRGB(h) {
  return {
    r: parseInt(h.slice(1,3),16),
    g: parseInt(h.slice(3,5),16),
    b: parseInt(h.slice(5,7),16)
  };
}

function hexStringToRGB(hexString) {
  return {
    r : getColor(hexString),
    g : getColor(hexString, 'g'),
    b : getColor(hexString, 'b')
  };
}

function getColor(string, color) {
  var num = 1;
  if(color == "g"){ num += 2; }
  else if(color == "b"){ num += 4; }
  return parseInt("0x" + string.substring(num, num+2));
}

function hexStringToRGB(hs) {
  return {r: parseInt(hs[1]+hs[2],16), g : parseInt(hs[3]+hs[4],16), b : parseInt(hs[5]+hs[6],16)}
}

function hexStringToRGB(s) {
  var foo=s.substring(1).match(/.{1,2}/g).map(function(val){return parseInt(val,16)})
  return {r:foo[0],g:foo[1],b:foo[2]}
}

function hexStringToRGB(hexString) {
  var hex = '0123456789ABCDEF'.split('');
   hexString = hexString.toUpperCase().split('');

  function hexToRGB(f,r){
    return hex.indexOf(f)*16 + hex.indexOf(r);
  }

  return {
    r: hexToRGB(hexString[1],hexString[2]),
    g: hexToRGB(hexString[3],hexString[4]),
    b: hexToRGB(hexString[5],hexString[6])
  }
}

About Skinning the Cats

“There are many ways to skin a cat” has it’s earliest print etymology in Money Diggers article in the 1840’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and Monthly America Review.  Even that reference implies it is a phrase already in use before then.  Generally the phrase implies there are many ways to achieve something.  In the context of this article, the analogy is that even simple tasks like writing a hex to RGB converter can be achieved in may different ways.

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