Blink Estimation

Estimation is one of the dark arts of software development.

Understandably, business stakeholders want to know how much of an investment they are going to be asked to sink into the project (or product), but all to often there is a lack of detail - how can we put a price on (or size to) a task when we don’t know what we’re going to do?

Dan North has a very interesting blog post Blink Estimation that covers an interesting technique, suitable for obtaining an approximate magnitude for a potential project with relatively little overhead.