Tolerant Project Estimates

Software developers will always be asked to estimate for work, so that project costs, timescales and resource requirements can be planned. Much as you’d like to just get on and build a web application, this, unfortunately, is a fact of life.

If your estimates are wildly under actual times, there can be repercussions. If you work for yourself you’ll most likely take a hit on the profit you’ll make on a project. If you work for someone else, your boss might not be too happy as the company has taken that hit.

This post talks about how to estimate, types of estimate (with a section on ballparks) and how you can manage the use and interpretation of estimates you provide.

Managing feature additions and bug fixes with Subversion

So, you’ve finished working on the initial release of an application and it goes live. At a later date you have to add an additional feature, sometimes more than one, but before these can go live, they require testing and approval.

Sometimes, the client wants subsequently implemented feature additions deployed before earlier ones. What happens if these involve changes to the same files?

In the meantime, bugs in the live application are identified and need fixing and deploying immediately, but these require changes to files that you’ve already changed for a feature addition, that is not ready to go live yet, and if it did, would break the application!

Sound familiar, if so, read on for a solution.