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Communicating Software Estimates
<p>Communication is hard. It's also extremely important. We're lucky that in the field of software development miscommunication tends to lead to project delays instead of loss of life.[^1] Estimates are also hard. It's challenging to produce accurate estimates in the first place, but even after a good estimate has been produced, comes the challenging work of communicating the estimates to interested parties</p>
Management and clients will often imagine something similar to the purple curve: a very narrow-band of uncertainty centered neatly around the average. Mention the Worst Case Here we simply add the worst-case scenario to our estimates, to help skew someone's perception to the possibility of a longer duration. Most software projects run behind schedule and a big reason is the difficulty in producing accurate estimates in the first place.
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