3 October 2007
Web Worker 101: Estimating Basics
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: Links .
As you enter a career of being an independent web worker, you can hardly avoid negotiating contracts with potential clients. Inevitably, the first questions that will come up are “how much is this going to cost?” and the closely-related “how long is it going to take?” Providing reasonable (and acceptable) answers to these questions is often the difference between a signed contract and an insincere commitment to call you back later. Whatever your skills as software developer or web designer (or whatever your web work career entails), you need to also understand the basics of estimating.
Unless you’re doing utterly routine piecework (data entry from paper forms or perhaps transcription), estimating is more art than science. But there are some things you can do to increase your chance of turning out a good estimate: one that ends up bearing some resemblance to the time it takes to do the actual work. Here are five tips to help you get started on refining your own time estimates.