The Crackdown on Code Times:

Why American companies are rethinking time estimation in programming teams…

...

Programming is an iterative process. Nothing remains stagnant. Evolving market

demands, shifting application goals, and rotating workforces ensure that the path a software
company takes is especially unpredictable (McQuade 2019, 32). Historically, commercial
software has adapted through efficient team-structures that balance individual agency with
managerial goals. Now, with modern developments in Artificial Intelligence and data
management, pioneer Startups are seeking to build upon traditional team systems by offering
time-estimation tools for managers and private workers that will revolutionize team planning.

The early years of system and application software were dominated by a sequential
framework of development known as “Waterfall Development,” where developers followed
strict deadlines and fixed goals with little adaptability for final products. In the 1990s, WD led to
an application crisis in which there was an approximate three-year lag between company
demands and product results (McQuade 2019, 31). Following years of scrutiny, in 2001, a group
of engineers finally met in Utah to put forth the “Agile Manifesto,” a list of principles to
introducing “agile development” – a work system characterized by iterative interaction with
users, integration of team members with often non-overlapping knowledge sets, and workflow
strategizing through small-task management (Tate 2017, 11).

Since 2001, managerial strategies like DevOps and Scrum have augmented Agile
systems. Yet, despite such progress, the Agile framework still suffers from budget cost overruns,
disconnects between managerial expectation and employee production, and project schedule
overruns (Maruping 2009, 377). The problem appears to be the difficulty of estimating the time-
cost of multiple small-scale projects with team members of varying levels of experience and
specialization. Any Agile team member knows the stress of working 20 hours on a task estimated
to take 5 hours! Unfortunately, companies employing Agile teams may spend days estimating the
time-cost of various tasks, only to overload employees and run late on schedule.

Sprixl seeks to enhance the Agile workflow by automating task estimation altogether!
Under the old system, team members bid on their opinion about how long they expect a given
task to take, and the average is calculated in a process colloquially called “planning poker.” All
task times are added to calculate the capacity – or how much can be done – by the team in each
interval, usually a “Sprint” of two weeks. This system introduces inaccurate estimations through
team members’ unfamiliarity with task responsibilities and leads to overblown manager
expectations, time waste, and poor company planning overall.

Luckily, Sprixl removes these challenges by providing instantaneous predictions guided

by a compounding dataset of tasks. For example, given a user task: “create an input button that
takes a username and password for user login,” Sprixl automatically searches all related tasks
ever completed in the dataset to predict the most likely time estimation of this next task. Sprixl
adheres to the Agile methodology “try something, consider the result, then try something else,
without extensive planning” by eliminating the need to spend company resources on task
planning (Austin 2012, 1507). Additionally, Sprixl is self-improving, continually accepting user-
feedback with a clean and intuitive interface. The brainchild of the Agile framework, Sprixl
expands upon an already brilliant system to empower both employer and employee with the
assurance of accurate, flexible, and adaptable planning.

Sign up for Sprixl Today: https://sprixl.com/

 Bibliography

Austin, Robert D., Lee Devin, and Erin E. Sullivan. 2012. “Accidental Innovation: Supporting
Valuable Unpredictability in the Creative Process.” Organization Science 23, no. 5: 1505–22.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23252320.

Maruping, Likoebe M., Viswanath Venkatesh, and Ritu Agarwal. 2009. “A Control Theory
Perspective on Agile Methodology Use and Changing User Requirements.” Information Systems
Research 20, no. 3: 377–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23015471.

McQuade, Maura Rose, Andrew Hunter, and Schuyler Moore. 2019. “Appendix A: How Agile
Software Development Came to Enable Adaptable Systems.” Acquisition of Software–Defined
Hardware–Based Adaptable Systems. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),
http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep22602.11.

Tate, David M. 2017 “Software Productivity Trends and Issues (Conference Paper).” Institute for
Defense Analyses. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep22675.