For my final group project, I made my effort estimates based on my own best guess of how long a task should be completed without the consideration of possible obstacles. Most times I wasn’t completely familiar with what was needed to be completed in order to complete the task, which is why my group broke up a lot of tasks that we assumed would take a considerable amount of time into small tasks to hopefully be completed in just a few hours. For example, implementing playwright was estimated to take about two hours to complete but actually took me more than 4 hours because I needed to learn about best practices for implementing test cases and the first trial of test cases came back mostly failing since I didn’t implement them correctly. For issues like these, estimates were very off because I wasn’t sure how much work and individual learning was required.
Regardless that the time estimated was often way off than the actual effort that was needed for a task, I believe that tracking actual effort was very useful because it helped with estimating future tasks and provided me with information that was sometimes very necessary. For tasks that I was more familiar with, sometimes I would notice that it would take a group member a substantial amount of time to complete an assigned task and another member a very short time to complete a similar task, which helped decide which tasks were best for each individual group member. Personally, it also helped me when I noticed that I was spending too much time on a single task. Then I made time to seek out help from my group members, which increased our efficiency. To track my progress, the tools that I used were WakaTime and Toggl. I found the VScode extension for tracking coding time to be the most convenient and accurate tool for tracking my coding effort.
In the future, I think I will be able to make slightly more accurate effort estimations because of the experience I gained from this final group project. I was able to do a lot of different issues that ranged from front end to back end and have a much better understanding of possible obstacles that come with certain tasks. For my tracking progress next time, I would definitely need to improve on how I track my non-coding effort because although I used a tool like WakaTime, sometimes I forgot about what was considered non-coding effort. Which oftentimes resulted in a very inaccurate time that was logged as non-coding effort and my time was usually very low in relation to the actual amount of non coding effort that was done.
For my effort estimations, AI was not used to make any estimates. Since these were just estimates, I didn’t think about using AI because I knew that even with AI assistance, the estimate would likely be very inaccurate to the actual time spent for an issue since each team member has their own strengths and weaknesses. Although I think it would be slightly beneficial to use AI in the future to make effort estimates because I believe that since many of my members weren’t completely familiar with all aspects of making a functional web application and we broke up a lot of bigger tasks into smaller manageable tasks, there were a handful of tasks that were what I considered “too small” which was completed in less than 30 minutes. I believe that AI would be useful with making more practical tasks that range from 2-5 hours to complete.