Thursday, 9 December 2010

A Realistic Look At Time I Can Spend Programming.

I work all day and I play all night! Trouble is I also need to sleep, eat, interact with family, train for marathons/Taekwondo and keep up with friends.

Like most people I am pretty busy.

So how long does this leave for coding at home. Well it varies a lot from week to week. After a lot of thinking and fiddling with numbers I came to the estimate of  an average of 10 hours a week.

Wow that is quite a low number and it is meant to measure actual hours of in the flow coding, there may be a few hours of TV coding where I don't get much done. Actually my heart tells me it is way too low as I often put in more but then some weeks very little get done. So 10 hours it is until I measure otherwise.

This means if a I estimate something will take 50 hours it will take me 5 weeks to complete it. Worse still is if I reckon it will take me 500 hours I am looking at a years work. Wow! But it gets even worse. Programmers (like me) usually underestimate how long something will take often by a factor of two. So those 50 hours turn into 10 weeks and the year long project could take anywhere up to 2 years.

It seems to me that I really should avoid anything where I estimate more than a hundred hours is required.

The 10 hours is an estimate. To reach true conclusions I should actually measure the time I spend coding but it does help to focus my mind on the size of projects I should be undertaking.

No comments:

Post a Comment