How do you do time estimates?
wallflower: In earlier performance reviews, I was always called to task for my reluctance to commit to a number of hours for a task. Nowadays, I give better numbers and hedge my numbers by asking for multiple tasks at once (so I can triage and switch among them as needed, simmer and return). I don't like it when developers are micro-managed (and my managers understand that - e.g. they know I'll get it done and know they can't dictate it).In my most recent 1.0 release with was done with Scrum and Sprints, what we observed happening was that overallocated time (tasks that did not need 6 days but took 2 days) was reallocated to tasks that needed much more time (10 days instead of 5 days). We were fortunate to usually meet our backlog for the Sprint (sometimes, more complicated tasks carried over) - but in practice, it seems that we had a fixed amount of time and the time estimates merely did a initial slice-up (which was not accurate). We hit the (pushed by 3 months) release deadline - however there was a fair amount of overtime.So, if I had a lesson - the moral of the story is - time estimates are nice but being all-in and committed to getting a product out the door is more important.