For instance if you've a well documented API of a competitive company that you know you can access in a familiar RESTful manner vs an established player with a SOAP interface, that has documentation - but it's wrong, and no available libraries for the language you are completing the task in, and a support team that wrong identifies the xml you're sending them as correct, it's going to take an unpredictable time. Even doing a vaguely related task using SOAP a few months previous hasn't enabled me to predict the duration of the unpredictable nature of SOAP, only that it will take longer.
The biggest difference in duration occurs when teaming up and working in a pair with an experienced developer that I've worked with in the past. Even then it's not a predictable duration on how much quicker this will be, or indeed if there's a guarantee of solving a tricky problem. All you can say it's likely that we'll solve it quicker.
Smaller tasks: Build a CRUD around editing one entity, authentication/authorisation for that and admin area. Estimatable.
More complex tasks that can't be broken down further: Unsure.
For instance if you've a well documented API of a competitive company that you know you can access in a familiar RESTful manner vs an established player with a SOAP interface, that has documentation - but it's wrong, and no available libraries for the language you are completing the task in, and a support team that wrong identifies the xml you're sending them as correct, it's going to take an unpredictable time. Even doing a vaguely related task using SOAP a few months previous hasn't enabled me to predict the duration of the unpredictable nature of SOAP, only that it will take longer.
The biggest difference in duration occurs when teaming up and working in a pair with an experienced developer that I've worked with in the past. Even then it's not a predictable duration on how much quicker this will be, or indeed if there's a guarantee of solving a tricky problem. All you can say it's likely that we'll solve it quicker.
Smaller tasks: Build a CRUD around editing one entity, authentication/authorisation for that and admin area. Estimatable.
More complex tasks that can't be broken down further: Unsure.