Sales Manager: "Why is time-estimation so complex?"

Posted by Tim on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Tim
Published on 2011-01-03T17:18:05Z Indexed on 2011/01/03 17:59 UTC
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estimation

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Sales

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time-estimation

A few days ago a sales manager asked me that question. But at this moment I didn't know a answer which he can understand. He isn't a programmer!

At the moment I work on a product which is over 8 years old. Nobody thought about architecture or evolvability. I have a swamp of code in front of me every day which is not tested. Because of that, time estimates are very difficult for me.

How I can describe that problem to an salesman? Not only my swamp-code-problem, but general!

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