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Software Engineering vocabulary · Agile and Team Workflow

Estimate

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈestɪmeɪt/verbCore term

In software engineering, estimate means: To judge roughly how much time or effort a task will take before you start it. As a noun, 'an estimate' is that rough figure.

In Turkish: tahmin etmek, efor tahmini yapmak, süre biçmek

How it is used

Teams estimate tickets in hours, days or story points during planning. Managers ask 'What's your estimate?' or 'Can you give me a rough estimate?' Estimates are guesses, so people usually add a buffer.

Example sentences

  1. I'd estimate two days for the backend part and one for the UI.

  2. Our first estimate was too optimistic; the migration took three weeks.

Common collocations

  • estimate a task
  • rough estimate
  • give an estimate
  • estimate in story points
  • sprintA fixed period, usually one or two weeks, in which a team commits to finishing a chosen set of work items.
  • ticketA record in a tracking tool such as Jira that describes one piece of work, like a bug, task or feature, and shows who owns it and its status.
  • backlogThe ordered list of work a team has not started yet, such as features, bugs and improvements, with the most important items at the top.
  • user storyA short description of a feature from the user's point of view, often written as 'As a [type of user], I want [goal] so that [reason]'.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Agile and Team Workflow

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