A colleague pointed me in the direction of an article that recently appeared in the Guardian. It’s from a regular self-help column, but might as well be about software development or, for that matter, anything that lives in the realm of extremistan. If I needed any more ammunition for my argument, well, I’ve got it now:
Hofstadter’s Law
“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.”
Beautifully put. You can’t account for Hofstadter’s law because of Hofstadter’s law!
Planning Fallacy
Sound familiar? Planning fallacy is the well documented social phenomenon that we tend to under-estimate task completion time. Interestingly, “Lovallo and Kahneman (2003) have expanded the original definition of the planning fallacy from being the tendency to underestimate task-completion times to being the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions. According to this definition, the planning fallacy results in not only time overruns, but also cost overruns and benefit shortfalls.” (from Wikipedia)
Optimism Bias
Similar to above, although plays more on our tendency to be self-centered (”I’m not suprised they f&%*ed up, they’re hopeless. It won’t happen to us - we’re much better than them”).
Cognitive bias
Planning fallacy and Optimism bias both fall into the category of cognitive bias. These are the ones most relevant to my case, but check out how many are documented on Wikipedia! I’m sure most of these (if not all) still apply to software development.
We’re not scientists
The scientific world clearly struggles massively with the problems created by cognitive bias and misinformation (there’s an Oxford University blog about it and Ben Goldacre makes his living documenting them (among other unscientific travesties)) . Scientists are scrupulous about their studies and still get it wrong. What chance do mere mortals like us have?
We’re not in the business of proving scientific hypotheses, we’re supposed to be making software. Considering the extreme unlikeliness of us being able to provide anything remotely useful from estimating and the time and money spent on it and the fact that there are now many much more suitable ways of fulfilling the needs its supposed to satisfy it’s finally time to get over our addiction.
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