As senior software engineer for my company, I'm often faced with assimilating a new platform, or language, or tool as part of a project. Some of these projects are so out of our niche that I haven't the slightest idea as to how long it will take to implement. I can approximate, but then I get chastised when I don't hit the approximation (guess that throws away the idea of an approximation). For example, our next project entails writing a custom application for the Pocket PC to be run on Symbol's portable barcode scanners, have that interface directly with a backoffice system on an old SCO box, and allow the batch transfer of items scanned via a serial link. Ok, great! Now, Symbol has an SDK that's fairly lucid, but I still have to learn the API. I may wind up having to write some daemon for SCO to facilitate the serial transfers, I'm not entirely sure yet.
Point is, how the hell can I accurately estimate this? Anyone else been in situations like these? It's very aggrivating to be expected to know something before I've had any time to research. I tried to research, but then I get, "why's it taking so long to create the estimate?" ARGH!
Point is, how the hell can I accurately estimate this? Anyone else been in situations like these? It's very aggrivating to be expected to know something before I've had any time to research. I tried to research, but then I get, "why's it taking so long to create the estimate?" ARGH!