Uncertainty in how long activities take, and even uncertainty in the list of activities, is the primary reason for poor accuracy of estimations. Do not confuse cause and effect:

You resort to encapsulating a volatility at the system design level only when it is open-ended and, unless encapsulated in a component of the architecture, would be very expensive to contain.

use the swim lanes technique later on in this chapter to both initiate and validate the design.

6. Motivation

Resenting Change

Services and Developers

Remember: Your mission as the architect is to identify not just a set of components that you can put together to satisfy all the core use case, but the smallest set of components. Why smallest? And what does smallest even mean?

Axes Of Volatility

To calculate the actual duration of a project as well several other key aspects of the project, you need to find the project’s critical path.