For making effort estimates, I tried my best to think about how long something would take based on how complex it was to implement into the website. I also took consideration from past homework experiences, like IslandSnow and Digits. For example, if the estimate was for creating a footer or a side menu, then I would keep the estimate relatively low, due to the fact that use of AI is significantly more efficient in this area of working on the website. But, if estimates would be longer for tasks that had to do with the database, as our group found out after M2, that working with the database was really tricky and took up lots of time.
There was a single occasion when I gave myself an estimate of trying to do something under my estimated time. While working on that issue, I found myself rushing to get work done, when the milestone wasn’t due for a couple days. By unknowingly setting an unrealistic deadline, I was digging myself in a deep hole of trying to get work done “on time.” However, that was just one bad case, I still think there were benefits to making these estimates in advance. Having these estimates in advance helped me better determine what times of the day my teammates and I could meet up in person, and work together on something. That way we could determine how long something would take during some of the brief windows we had between classes.
I don’t think there are any downsides to tracking the effort expended on issues, I only see good coming out of it. Tracking the effort is a way to show us how long each individual spent on the project. If someone puts a lot of time and effort into something, that can be represented through the tracking effort form we all filled out.
The method I did for tracking effort was looking at the clock during the creation of the branch, and looking at the clock when I created the pull request. I don’t believe that my tracking was very accurate, because there were many times when I stopped working on the project and took small breaks. These small breaks I put into the non coding effort column, and for non coding effort, I give it my best guess. I did not keep track of the time for the non coding effort.
There was an instance where I did procrastinate working on the project due to the fact that one of my team members wrote an estimate of about two hours to write one feature. It was very discouraging at first, but eventually I got to work on that issue and it didn’t take as long. But, that feature was scrapped from our final product a couple minutes before class to save time, so that was also a little discouraging as well.