The purpose of estimating software projects is not business planning its to create a self imposed deadline that creates social pressure for teams to finish the project.
This sounds insane. When I was an engineer I hated estimation and deadlines. My feeling was, it will be done when it’s done and we don’t know when it will be done. I would obnoxiously give a probability distribution whenever asked if we would ship on time.
But in reality, in a complex project with many people or teams, people need a good deadline, one that is aggressive but not insane. This is what lets everyone involved solve for what really matters, cut things that don’t matter, and push to complete something really hard.
It’s a silly social convention, but it really helps. In fact setting aggressive but not insane deadlines, slipping them when needed but holding them when possible, is one of the key capabilities in engineering management.
