Around the Software

When we're estimating a feature or a story or a software change, we almost always think of the following:

• time to design the feature
• time to implement the feature
• time test the feature

And we come out with an estimate: "2 engineers and 1 tester for a week" (or whatever).

That estimate fails to account for all the other work that needs to be done. We have yet to estimate:

• test infrastructure extensions
• other infrastructure extensions (e.g., do we need to provision a hosted site for centralized client logging?)
• documentation modification or creation
• configuration analysis and best practices development (to answer the questions customers have)
• marketing, presentation, and other collateral updates

Just because the product code has been written, and even if the tests have been done, a feature isn't done yet. Don't forget to plan for - and actually do - all the stuff around the software.