Figuring out how long a given piece of development work in Notes/ Domino has always been something of a black art, various tools and methodologies have been tried but few have been more than passingly accurate. The most serious discrepancies occur when you are working with legacy data or legacy applications which need work, you have to be careful to not change anything you don't understand, or cause knock on effects elsewhere but in a complex application you just don't have time to do that much analysis. You end up having a look, prototyping the idea then if you have as many years of experience as I do estimating the work required with a chunk of contingency added on.
You sometimes win and you sometimes lose, if you doing consecutive bits of work these can cancel one another out. The most important thing though is to keep the project manager informed as soon as you know your estimate is out, and you can't keep going back time and time again with increased estimates, at some point you as a consultant have to bite the bullet and charge for your last agreed estimate, even if it ends up taking you more time which you don't get paid for. This happened just last week with Dept of Health, it only cost me half a day on a five day project which is OK, the client is happy, I enjoyed the work and it got finished.
Andrew Broxholme 25 November 2008 17:35:37