Comment by nyeah
6 months ago
One cause of this is that folks finish the first 90% and are surprised to discover the second 90% still undone. It feels, intuitively, as if you should be able to subtract. (Everything - 90%) should be around 10%, right? No. It's like relativity or something. It doesn't work the way we naively expect.
Even experienced people fall into this trap again and again.
If that's the issue, then remembering to double your timeline estimates helps a lot. Fallback is to have a boss who doubles them for you. If you haven't set aside time for "debugging" and "iteration", you can use those labels for the second 90%. Sometimes they're even accurate labels.
BTW: If you try this fix: In your mind and on any paper plans, label the second 90% as something indispensable. Do not call it "refactoring" or anything else that sounds like it could be done after you ship. It can't. Ask me how I know.