Dapper Specs - Estimated Developer Days

*Notice to all Dapper Spec Assignees in Launchpad*

As mentioned in last week's Dapper Development Status Update meeting,
please could all those listed as assignees on DapperSpecs(goals) [1]
please update the field in the 'Change Status' section of the spec. See
an example here [2].

---
We realise that there are many different ways to look at making such and
estimate (and none of them are perfect) and some of the questions that
arise are issues such as:

* Is it the number of days to implement the spec if I had no
other work to do, and could focus on it for every hour of the day;

* Or the number of days taking into account being distracted on IRC,
dealing with e-mail, bug reports, merges, etc. along the way;

* Or is it the number of days /from now/ that you expect the spec to be
completed, bearing in mind all of the above and other specs in front of
it in the priority queue;

* And should I take into account the fact that on most days I'm only
really productive on a given task for maybe a couple of hours a day?

* And finally can I complete the task and THEN insert how long it
actually took?

---

We have agreed that we will standardise on the first approach, that is
the estimate should be done in isolation. So for instance if someone
else was given that spec how long would it take them to implement it
(assuming they had a reasonable knowledge and understanding of the goal
to start with.). Calculating one normal productive working day being how
much you could expect to get done between 8:00-17:00. If you feel you
need to add a comment explaining or justifying your estimate please add
it to the status whiteboard underneath the estimate field.

We will need to manually load balance for those with high operational
over heads, and multiple parallel goals.

Don't be too stressed about making the calculation, after all it is just
an estimate. The idea is for us to gauge the size of the tasks involved
and to make sure that the load is fairly spread over the team. Here we
will take operational overhead etc into account as well.

So at the very least we need to know if it's a one day, one week or one
month kind of a goal.

Thanks to those that have already inserted their estimates. Please could
the rest be completed by end of day tomorrow (Wednesday 23 November
2005).


[1] https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+specstable
[2]https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/dapper-desktop-plan/+status

Many thanks
-- 
JaneW
_____________
Jane Weideman
mobile: +27 83 779 7800
Canonical Ltd.