August 16, 2004
Software Estimating and Economic Forecasting
There's an old joke that "God created economists to make weather forecasters look good."
In today's Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins goes some way to explaining why.
He quotes Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago who, in an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, listed five biases that psychological research has shown influence people's forecasts:
- Optimism
- Over-Confidence
- The False Concensus Effect: the tendency to assume that others think like us
- The Curse of Knowledge: the tendency to assume that others have learnt from the same sources
- Status Quo: the tendency to assume that things will remain the same
The article by Gittins was written about predicting the future of economic trends. But I couldn't help thinking about it's applicability to estimating software development activities.
Predicting the future is inherently difficult, despite the temptation to believe otherwise.
Posted to People, Software Development by Keith Pitty