No they aren’t. I’ve been doing this for a few decades working everywhere from small startups to the most successful tech companies, and none of them are good at estimating.

If you read the blog post, they were able to manually migrate 3% of the tests in 1 week. Extrapolating that gives you an estimate of less than half of the 1.5 year estimate.

I’d also say there’s a pretty good chance that the 3% of tests the automated process couldn’t handle were more complicated than average and the devs would have gotten faster at doing these migrations after the first week.

It’s very unclear what was actually being compared. A team did a POC in 2023 and then some work in 2024 and then spent 6 weeks tweaking the pipeline and a final week manually migrating the tests that the automated process couldn’t handle.

But they don’t specify how many people worked on this or how many people were going to work on the original project. It could have been 1 guy on the team.

As for looking at what the actual work was, it was migrating from one test framework to another one. I’d be surprised if a team couldn’t have written a compiler to do something similar in a similar amount of time.