Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability (opens in new tab)

Like software developers would be some fairies living in mystical land? It is not working that way from other point of view, and that point of view is where money come from ;)

I'm the author of the gist. The submitter is a good friend of mine that felt like posting it, and I don't mind.

It was a reply I made to another friend and previous co-worker on twitter a while back that was talking about software estimation. It wasn't a comment on any other blog post or hackernews story.

I was thinking I should edit and elaborate on it into a full blog post at some point, but that would also require setting up a blog ;P I didn't take the time to write this up to the standards of an adversarial blog aggregation audience. And I don't care to defend it as such or in detail. It's meant to outline a broad point I think is true, but not to be ironclad in it's argument.

Anyhow, no cherry picking or anything unethical going on here.

This particular entry looks more like someone just read The Mythical Man-Month and decided to write something about the philosophy of software project management afterwards.

Not that it's necessarily bad, but it is formulaic.

I think it depends where you draw the line. These comparisons can be hard to make due to different accounting of what counts as "reuse." In this reply to a friend I was taking a very broad economic like view. For example: no one is rewriting the linux kernel from the ground up to launch an ecommerce app. Likewise people generally aren't rewriting the functionality provided by their langauges' standard libraries for each app. So in the broadest sense of all labor involved, there's a lot more reuse going on than a more narrow experiment may consider.

Any chance you remember where that measurement came from? I could use that with a client right now, given we're discussing a major refactor of about 25%-30% of the code base.

Having never worked on an e-commerce store or anything like it, do those sorts of products usually exceed their schedules?