Software Estimation and the The Alchemy of Client Expectation Management

Note: This month we're back at the Bloor and Bathurst location, courtesy of Alexis Allen.

For December we've got a great speaker coming all the way from New York. Adam Aronson, whose company, Full City Consulting, has won a number of FileMaker excellence awards, will be giving a version of a talk he gave at the Pause on Error FileMaker conference in New York. Unfortunately, I only made it to the last part of the talk. The room was packed with many of the top FileMaker developers in North America, and Adam had them in the palm of his hand. Estimating should be important to us all, whether we're in-house developers working to meet the objectives of a team, or consultants setting the expectations of clients, or we're working on a database for the business we're building and need to make sure we stay on track. Getting good at estimating is an important step towards professionalization, and it's something to which most of us don't give enough consideration. Here's Adam's abstract...

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From the first "Hi, we need a FileMaker solution for ___." you're waiting for it. The inevitable "ok, so... how much will it cost and how long will it take?". Well, how do you know? When do you know? Do you ever really know? One of the most important tools that a seasoned FileMaker Developer can have is the ability to estimate the task at hand - great or small. Arguably it is also the one we stress the most about.
Conversely, I would encourage you to try and see estimating as one of the tools you can leverage to manage a software project to it's successful "end". What do the other Jedi Masters of Software Estimation say on this topic?
At this session we'll probe these questions and discuss what can be done to demystify what to some is the most challenging aspect of our work. We'll discuss what the masters have taught (and how it applies to FileMaker), illustrate some of the challenges, share some real life experiences and open up the conversation for others to do the same.