How did you estimate the time you will spent before starting a web development project? [closed]

Question

It feels really bad when you told your client or the manager that this can be finished by 10 days but you spent 20 days to get a point even not deployed to live yet.

Any experience can share with me about how did you estimated the time spent on a proposed projects?

Thanks

Answer 1

Experience will help you get better as estimating, nothing else.

The most important thing to remember is to keep people informed though.

If the task was estimated at 10 days and you're at day 5 and clearly not going to manage it in 10, you should let people know at that point, not when it reaches day 11.

There are three options when things go over time, you take the hit and do the work anyway, you cut stuff from the system or you ask for more money for completion. The sooner that can be decided the better.

Answer 2

As much as possible try to break things down into small pieces at the beginning. I've read before that people cannot accurately estimate the duration of anything that is longer than a couple of days, so the only thing you can do to work around that is to try to identify all of the pieces and estimate each one separately.