Specifically Wrong
When people who hold the purse strings tell people asking them for money to answer those three questions very specifically, they're asking for almost useless information. This becomes obvious whenever managers try to do “bottom-up” estimates. They try to identify all the tasks and estimate the effort for each. You can imagine them building up the Gantt chart as they go, filling in more and more detail. The total time for the project, then, is the sum of all the tasks. The result is often an unintentional fib, which is why a very large number of software projects deliver late.
The problem is the level of detail. Very rarely can I tell someone months in advance how long a software development project will take, if I have to be ...
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