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Comment by jhbrown

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Comment by jhbrown

At a prior startup of mine, we needed to set prices for a series of 12-month, fixed-price, fixed-deliverable contracts. Since most tools typically used for planning software projects are terribly bad at helping you make good estimates, we did a lot of reading and then implemented an internal tool that produced really useful estimates.

Lately I’ve reimplemented those tools as broadly-available SaaS. It’s fully functional, albeit with rough edges, so I’m hoping to get people to kick the tires and give me feedback! The tool is called DoomCheck -- as checking to see if your project is doomed. DoomCheck is up and running at doomcheck.com, where you can play with a temporary plan right from the landing page, no signup required.

Please give it a try, and let me know what you think! I would absolutely love questions and feedback here and/or through the feedback or contact links on the site. Honestly, any way you can get it to me, I’ll take it.

If you’d like to know more before you dive in, here’s a bit more on what makes DoomCheck different and better than the usual suspects for project estimation:

- When you estimate work, you use two values to define a range, e.g. “{1-4h}”, rather than just a single-value guess. Ranges let you express uncertainty and risk -- a familiar task might be {1-1.5h}, and something new might be {20-60h}. (Factors of 3-4 uncertainty are not uncommon in software tasks.)

- When DoomCheck renders a project, it combines your individual work estimates to produce probability-of-completion graphs based on hours worked. It computes the full probability range for each section and subsection and subsection of your plan. This enables you to interactively explore your project in Graph View to look for particular problem areas.

- You write a project plan as plain text (an extended Markdown format) rather than each task being its own page and requiring multiple clicks to create, edit, or even just visit. This makes it very easy to put in lots of fine-grained estimates, and to restructure the plan at will. It also lets you make the project plan a true narrative rather than a bag of nested checklists.

- You can add labor budgets to your sections and subsections by writing, e.g., “{budget 12h}”. Then you can filter for sections that have low probability of on-budget completion using the slider in Graph View.

- You can also use DoomCheck to track ongoing projects. You can close work estimates with a closed tag, e.g. “{1-4h closed}”, and you can optionally also record labor like this: {spent 1.25h} The Progress graph shows the time-history of the project as the project plan evolves. (You’ll need to sign up for a (free) account to track project history, since you have to be able to save the plan to accrue that history.)

Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you try out, and like, DoomCheck!

Replies jhbrown · 2023-01-19
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