6 weeks' work in 2...?

Are you about to tackle a giant project that you think will take 6 weeks but want to do it 2 weeks? How do you do that? YOU DON'T.

Image credit: Techlead Mentor.

Raviraj Achar

’s recent article, How to do 6 Weeks Worth of Work in 2?, offers advice every developer should heed.

I spent a couple of days and arrived at an estimate of “2 weeks.”

In reality, I kind of forced a “2-week” estimate because that was the sprint cycle. I wasn’t honest with myself.

I think you see where this is going!

Raviraj gives us a real-world, easy to digest story about where it’s going, which is into a mountain of trouble.

His 9 tips on what he should have done differently are all excellent advice that I wish many of my past junior team members had seen.

I would add one more to Raviraj’s list: don’t estimate alone. I don’t put much stock in estimates. We engineers always get it wrong (but then, so does everybody else). We can do better by making estimation a group exercise. Get other eyes on the problem. Hear what other engineers think it would take to build something. That way instead of missing a lot of details… Well, hopefully we just miss a few.

An even b…