What's in a name

You must be wondering what this blog is all about with a name like that. Believe me I learnt this phrase about 2 years back and it stands for “Scientific Wild Ass Guess”. I quite like the term because it gives an air of authenticity to an estimate and at the same time acknowledges that this is a guess after all. There is nothing scientific about it. But if you tell a person that the SWAG number is 200 person days of effort as opposed to saying that I pulled this number out of a hat, the former is more likely to be accepted. Because it feels scientific, it sounds cool and probably because the audience does not know the meaning of swag.

At the very lowest level swag is nothing more than an estimate where a number of assumptions are made about the scope and the size (effort and schedule) is estimated. We earlier used to have the WBS method or the ‘x people for y months’ method of estimate and both of those will qualify as swags.

So that brings us to the million dollar question as to why Software Engineering is still considered as an abstract art rather than a scientific engineering discipline. I don’t have the answers yet but I will share my thoughts on this topic in the next blog. Till then keep swagging!!

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