this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Programming

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Breaking larger tasks down effectively removes uncertainty.

My general rule of thumb in planning is that any task that is estimated for longer than 1 day should be broken up.

Longer than one day communicates that the person doing the estimate knows it’s a large task, but not super clear about the details. It also puts a boundary around how long someone waits before trying to re-scope:

A task that was expected to take one week, but ends up going 2x is a slide of a week, but a task that is estimated at one day but takes 3x before re-scope is a loss of 2 days.

You can pick up one or two days, but probably not one or two weeks.