Guesstimate

What if there was a way to skirt the inaccuracy issues inherent to spreadsheet estimations? What if there was a way you could make accurate estimations without having extremely dense experience making estimations? It just so happens that that exists today, and it's called "Guesstimate".

Guesstimate was born in pursuit of a solution for these problems and addresses them by breaking away from traditional estimation methods. Even the best spreadsheet templates have hard limits on the level of detail you can go to. With Guesstimate you can approach a problem as if it's a fractal, where you can continue zooming in and finding distinct parts until you are at a comfortable level of granularity to estimate. With each task you are given the choice to either assign an estimate, or expand it and add sub-tasks. This is roughly the same concept of "divide and conquer" which inspired an algorithmic concept of the same name that breaks a problem into similar/more solvable problems and enables you to solve problems more reliably across the set of all problems.

The result is a deep tree of accurate micro-estimations that get summed up for you. With enough discipline you can break your project into provably accurate blocks and confidently embark on the journey to ship it™.

estimate-ui.jpg

Technology List

  • React
  • Redux
  • Tree data structure

Challenges

The biggest challenge was somewhat self-inflicted as each task manipulation must currently be done recursively which has the potential of wasting unnecessary cycles. To remedy this, in the next iteration, a more easily traversable data structure