We are not selling jeans here¶

Do you remember this scene from the movie Moneyball when Billy Beans (Brad Pitt) has a conversation with his scouts about building Oakland's baseball team for the next season ?

Scouts evaluate players using all kinds of poetic terms. At some point they even rate a girlfriend of one of the players (rating her 6) and use this number as a proxy to estimate player's self confidence...

At that moment Billy introduces the data guy, and the rest becomes history...

When watching it, my one track mind kicked in and I started getting flashbacks of all software project discussions I ever took part in. Always fun. All those people using all kinds of poetic terms trying to estimate the complexity of software.

Estimating software is hard. We never do the same thing twice, people in the dev team change, no two customers are the same etc.

However, every day, every software project generates lots of data. Code commits, test results, issue updates, customer support items, testers feedback you name it. Wouldn't it be great if we use this data to evaluate and estimate software projects ?

"we are not selling jeans here"...