Link to Spreadsheet: Spreadsheet
In the beginning of the project, I knew that It would take a lot of time to create the basis of what the application needed, so I set my time estimate for beginning issues (2 and 4) pretty high at 8 hours. I didn’t draw from any experience on how much effort it would take in the beginning, I just set the number high since I didn’t know much about the meteor template and how it worked. As time went on and I finished more in the project, my estimates became lower because I knew how everything worked and figured out how long it would take me. I think having the experience that you can draw from really help to create better estimates.
In my opinion, I don’t think that there was a benefit in making effort estimates in advance. I found myself working on the project for long hours and completing my issues on time without any trouble. Whenever my code wasn’t working or had any problems, I would spend as long it took to solve the problem. I feel like the milestones were more beneficial than the estimates. The milestones helped me to stay on track and made sure that I completed my issues on time.
I didn’t find any benefit from tracking the actual effort that I spent on the issue. I found it interesting to see how much time I spent on the project, but I don’t think it was beneficial. The actual time I spent on the project didn’t really matter to me, as long as I completed my issues on time. I wasn’t going to stop working just because I was over my estimated effort time. I wanted to make sure that my part of the application was completed and working, to allow the project to keep moving forward.
I tracked my actual effort by using the stopwatch on google, and timed how long I spent on the project. I used Darkyen’s Time Tracker in IntelliJ to track my coding time on the project. I found my non-coding time by subtracting my coding time from the actual time that I spend on the project. I think that my tracking was pretty accurate, but I think that the biggest flaw in my tracking is that Darkyen’s Time Tracker isn’t very accurate at tracking how long I actually spent on a project. Sometimes, It would track when I was tabbed out out of IntelliJ.