It also became a bit of a standing joke that these estimates were not only painstakingly worked on over days or weeks, but as soon as we gave them to a project manager, they would double the figures. When we challenged that practice, they'd remind us that all software developers are optimistic and that buffers were needed.
But it's not that we're optimistic by nature; in fact, a lot of us had already factored in our own buffer allowances. The explanation is more straightforward; the work we do is novel—more often than not we are working on something entirely different from what we've built before: different domain, different technology stack, different frameworks, and so on.
Some teams would combat this by offering two ...
