Comment by arrsingh

I actually did this (around 2006) after reading this article by Joel and I was skeptical but I used excel and wrote down all the tasks that needed to be done and kept breaking it down till each task was in hours.

It took me a few hours to do and as Joel says in the article, it was not a fun thing to do (jumping right into code was more fun) but I stuck with it and did the whole thing.

Then I followed that list of tasks and kept track of when tasks started and ended and I was pleasantly surprised when after a few weeks the project was done right on schedule as predicted by the excel sheet. So my experience (data point of 1) was that it works if you do it exactly how he says to do it in the blog post.

I did it only that one time so take that for what it is.